From their shelter, after the briefest
instant, she lifted her face to greet her guardian and found him staring
at the Queen in a sort of stupid unbelief.
"I brought--" Robin started an introduction, but did not finish. For,
recovering, with an obvious effort, his natural manner of politeness,
her guardian was hurrying down the steps to the little car.
"Madame Forsyth, I did not expect--"
CHAPTER XXIV
MADAME FORSYTH COMES HOME
"No. I judge from all your faces no one expected me!" exclaimed Madame
Forsyth coldly, extending to Cornelius Allendyce the tips of her
fingers. "Harkness, you look as though you were seeing a ghost!"
Her rebuking words had the effect of galvanizing poor Harkness' limbs to
action--but not his tongue. Though he hobbled down the steps and took
the bag from the lawyer's hand, not a word could he speak from sheer
stupefaction.
And Hannah Budge so forgot her long years of loyalty to the House of
Forsyth as to cry out--"Oh, Miss Robin!" before so much as one word of
greeting for Madame Forsyth.
"You could 'a clean knocked me over," she explained to Harkness
afterward, "Our Madame going away as fine as you please with that
baggage of a Florrie who was as full of tricks as a cat after a mouse,
and coming back in that old car that had moss on it, I do believe, and
with Miss Robin, too, who they all thought was lost though _I_ knew
better.
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