“_Vide_ auctioneer’s catalogue,” said Rosa. “But I decline to touch it, highly recommended though it is by a distinguished canootzer. I’ll have of that bread, however, une trauche, s’il vous plait, and I’ll poach a couple of those eggs, if I do get three months for it. How funny! Didn’t I say something about plovers’ eggs just now?” “I’d be afraid to meddle with the eggs, but I’ll back you up in the matter of the bread and cheese; I’m fairly starving. On the whole, perhaps we would do well to hunt up Mrs. Pearce first. It’s as well to be ceremonial even in a house that you have broken into by stealth. If you take so much as a bite of that egg before we can start level, I’ll cut you up into such small slices.” The knife which Priscilla had picked up for the purpose which she had but partly defined, fell from her hand. A sound had come from the big hooded chair in the shadow of the screen at the fireplace, and she had glanced round and seen, looking round the side of the chair at her, a man’s face. The knife fell from her grasp at the startling sight. Rosa, following the direction of her gaze, turned round and saw the apparition; but she did not let fall the egg which she had taken up for critical inspection. There was an awkward silence, but an effective tableau, had any one been present to see it. There was the large square room, with bookcases of the loveliest Chippendale design hiding all its walls, and at one side of the table stood a young woman, with a face beautifully rosy, and a mouth slightly open to complete the expression of astonishment that looked forth from her eyes; at the end of the table nearest the fireplace, another girl glancing over her shoulder at the man’s face that protruded beyond the line of downward slope at one side of the chair. Perhaps the expression of astonishment on the man’s face was the strongest of the three. His mouth was quite wide open, and his eyes were staring curiously, with a look within them that suggested that he had not quite succeeded in taking in the details of the picture before him--that he had not succeeded in reconciling all that he saw with the actualities of life. Both the girls perceived in a moment that he had just awakened; but this fact did not prevent their being paralysed for the moment--for several moments. The moments went on into minutes, until the whole thing had the note of the child’s game of “Who speaks first?” It was this broadening of an impressive silence into a child’s comedy that was the saving of the situation. A smile, to which his open mouth lent itself quite readily, came over the young man’s face--he was a young man, and his face was still younger--and, after a maidenly hesitancy of a few seconds, the girls also smiled. His smile broadened into a grin, and both girls broke into a peal of laughter.