'I may perhaps catch him to-night'
A little more business talk, and the agent departed. Then Elizabeth
dreamily--still cogitating a hundred things--touched an electric
bell. A girl typist, who acted as her clerk, came in from an
adjoining room. Elizabeth rapidly dictated a number of letters,
stayed for a little friendly gossip with the girl about her father
in the Army Service Corps, who had been in hospital at Rouen, and
had just finished, when the gong rang for afternoon tea.
* * * * *
When Elizabeth entered, the hall was crowded. It was the principal
sitting-room of the house, now that for reasons of economy fires
were seldom lit in the drawing-rooms. Before Elizabeth's advent it
had been a dingy, uncomfortable place, but she and Pamela had
entirely transformed it. As in the estate so in the house, the
Squire did not know what he possessed. In all old houses with a
continuous life, there are accumulations of furniture and stores,
discarded by the generation of one day, and brought back by the
fashion of the next.
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