“I’m afraid not.” And, contrary to her practice she dropped behind. “Why is not Lord Sigismund coming back?” I shouted to Menzies-Legh, whose caravan was following mine, mine as usual being in the middle; and I walked on backward through all the puddles so as to face him, being unable to leave my horse. “Eh?” said he. How like an ill-conditioned carter he looked, trudging gloomily along, his coat off, his battered hat pushed back from his sullen forehead! Another week, I thought, and he would be perfectly indistinguishable from the worst example of a real one. “Why is not Lord Sigismund coming back?” I repeated, my hands up to my mouth in order to carry my question right up to his heavy ears. “He’s prevented.” “Prevented?” “Eh?” “Prevented by what?” “Eh?” This was wilfulness: it must have been. “What--has--prevented--him?” I roared. “Look out--your van will be in the ditch.” And turning quickly I was just in time to pull the tiresome brute of a horse, who never could be left to himself an instant, straight again. I walked on shrugging my shoulders. Menzies-Legh was without any doubt as ill-conditioned a specimen of manhood as I have ever come across. At the four crossroads beyond Brede, on the party’s pausing as usual to argue over the signpost while Fate, with Frogs’ Hole Farm up her sleeve, laughed in the background, I laid my hand on Jellaby’s arm--its thinness quite made me jump--and said, “Where is Lord Sigismund?” “Gone home, I believe, with his father.” “Why is he not coming back?” “He’s prevented.” “But by what? Is he ill?” “Oh, no. He’s just--just prevented, you know.” And Jellaby slipped his arm out of my grasp and went to stare with the others up at the signpost. On the road we finally decided to take, while they were all clustering round the labourer I have mentioned who directed us to the deserted farm, I approached Frau von Eckthum who stood on the outer fringe of the cluster, and said in the gentler voice I instinctively used when speaking to her, “I hear Lord Sigismund is not coming back.” Gently as my voice was, it yet made her start; she generally did start when spoken to, being unusually (it adds to her attractiveness) highly strung. (“She doesn’t when I speak to her,” said Edelgard, on my commenting to her on this characteristic. “My dear, you are merely another woman,” I replied--somewhat sharply, for Edelgard is really often unendurably obtuse.) “I hear Lord Sigismund is not coming back,” I said, then, very gently, to the tender lady. “Oh?” said she. For the first time I could have wished a wider range of speech. “He has been prevented, I hear.” “Oh?” “Do you know what has prevented him?”