“You’ve been roaming the country then alone?” Mr. Prodmore inquired. The girl protested with instant eagerness against any such picture. “Oh, dear no, not _alone_!” She spoke, absurdly, as if she had had a train of attendants; but it was an instant before she could complete the assurance. “There were ever so many people about.” “Nothing is more possible than that there should be _too_ many!” said her father, speaking as for his personal convenience, but presenting that as enough. “But where, among them all,” he demanded, “is your trusty maid?” Cora’s reply made up in promptitude what it lacked in felicity. “I didn’t bring her.” She looked at the old portraits as if to appeal to them to help her to remember why. Apparently indeed they gave a sign, for she presently went on: “She was so extremely unwell.” Mr. Prodmore met this with reprobation. “Wasn’t she to understand from the first that we don’t permit----” “Anything of that sort?”--the girl recalled it at least as a familiar law. “Oh, yes, papa--I _thought_ she did.” “But she doesn’t?”--Mr. Prodmore pressed the point. Poor Cora, at a loss again, appeared to wonder if the point had better be a failure of brain or of propriety, but her companion continued to press. “What on earth’s the matter with her?” She again communed with their silent witnesses. “I really don’t quite know, but I think that at Granny’s she eats too much.” “I’ll soon put an end to _that_!” Mr. Prodmore returned with decision. “You expect then to pursue your adventures quite into the night--to return to Bellborough as you came?” The girl had by this time begun a little to find her feet. “Exactly as I came, papa dear,--under the protection of a new friend I’ve just made, a lady whom I met in the train and who is also going back by the 6.19. She was, like myself, on her way to this place, and I expected to find her here.” Mr. Prodmore chilled on the spot any such expectations. “What does she want at this place?” Cora was clearly stronger for her new friend than for herself. “She wants to see it.” Mr. Prodmore reflected on this complication. “Today?” It was practically presumptuous. “Today won’t do.” “So I suggested,” the girl declared. “But do you know what she said?” “How should I know,” he coldly demanded, “what a nobody says?” But on this, as if with the returning taste of a new strength, his daughter could categorically meet him. “She’s not a nobody. She’s an American.” Mr. Prodmore, for a moment, was struck: he embraced the place, instinctively, in a flash of calculation. “An American?” “Yes, and she’s wild----” He knew all about that. “Americans mostly _are_!” “I mean,” said Cora, “to see this place. ‘Wild’ was what she herself called it--and I think she also said she was ‘mad.’” “She gave”--Mr. Prodmore reviewed the affair--“a fine account of herself! But she won’t do.”