CHAPTER 17It was a fine, bright morning after a wet night. The sun was forcing its way audaciously through the lattice-windows of the lodge, touching with gold everything within its reach, and Miss Tottie Delauney, responding to the call of nature, was inclined to be loquacious. Breakfast was in progress.
"It isn't so much what they say, mother," she began, spreading a piece of fresh bread left by the baker in the early hours with butter, "it's how they say it. Asks one all sorts of questions about little things that don't matter, and when one has got something to say worth listening to shuts one up with, 'If you take my advice, you'll hold your tongue. There's such a thing as the law of libel!' Sickenin' I call it. What do they want?"
"Well," Mrs. Yates replied slowly from behind a heav
