Some people--for of course in the neighbourhood of Halswood as elsewhere there were to be found human beings with superfluous energy to spare from the management of their own concerns, which they apparently conceived it to be their duty to bestow on those of others--some people thought it very odd and absurd of Captain and Mrs Chancellor to burden themselves with a child on their foreign tour. It was so odd as only to be explicable by the comprehensive assertion of Mrs Chancellor's being, to say the least, "very odd altogether." For notwithstanding all the care that had been taken to guard against outside remark, some amount of gossip had oozed out concerning Eugenia's hasty flight from Halswood. Servants, the very best of them perhaps, will but be servants. It was not in Mrs Grier's nature to refrain from lugubrious head-shakings and mysterious allusions when she found that her young mistress had actually left home without any explanation to herself, the vice-gerent of the establishment, of the reasons for this sudden step; it was not in the unexceptionable Blinkhorn's nature to refrain, at the first table at least, from comment upon his master's state of anxiety and dejection during the days of uncertainty and foreboding which succeeded his return home. And the natures of the various inferior functionaries in the Halswood household, being neither better nor worse than are ordinarily met with in their respective capacities, the rolling stone of gossip, contrary to the adage, grew and gathered as it went, till but few of the great houses in the neighbourhood, none certainly of the tea-tables in the little town of Chilworth or of the less pretentious Sunday afternoon entertainments in the farm houses on the estate, but had their own pet version of the Halswood scandal.