“Not a bit of it! Don’t you worry your pretty little head any more, except of course about poor old Chester. The extraordinary thing to me is that a man like Colonel Lindsay-Wolseley, who’s spent half his life chasing Afghans and all that sort of thing about the hills of the North-west Frontier, wouldn’t insist on leading one of the search-parties. But they’re all the same, these old soldiers. Their livers get congested, I think. What Wolseley likes is bringing up petty points at a Council meeting. That’s his idea of excitement nowadays. Awful, isn’t it? I hope Hector’ll soon find the right girl and get married. He’s been in the Army just about long enough. In fact between you and me, Carrie, I wish he and Myrtle would make a match of it.”

“Oh, you think they’d suit one another?” Carrie asked, with a touch of dubiety in her tone.

“Don’t you?”

“Well, Myrtle is a girl who’ll choose for herself, that’s sure.”

“I’m very glad to hear it. I mean to say a young fellow like Hector wants to feel he’s been chosen, not just picked out of a drawer like a handkerchief. But look here, I must get along and change. Will you join my rescue-party?”

Carrie hesitated.

“Don’t you think I’d be wiser to stay home?” she suggested. “If I weren’t home when Chester came back with his rescuers he’d feel he’d have to go out again and look for me.”

Mrs MacDonald coming along at that moment overheard this remark of Carrie’s, which she acclaimed as profoundly sensible. She was not given to making demands on the sympathy of her guests, but a brief interview she had just had with Mrs. Ablewhite, during which she had not received the support she might have expected from Mrs Parsall, had left her with a desire to confide in another woman.

So when the various noises connected with the dispatch of the search-parties by Ben Nevis had died away in a medley of shouting, piping, whistling, and tooting, Mrs MacDonald asked Carrie to come and sit with her in that room that was for ever England in spite of still being called the Yellow Drawing-room. There she spoke to Carrie of the temperamental peculiarities of Mrs Parsall and Mrs Ablewhite and even of Toker. And in her turn Carrie talked to Mrs MacDonald about Wilton’s British oddities and the French excitability of her own maid Celestine.