CHAPTER FIVETwenty Minutes to One
The hunters were magnificent. They refused to be guests, they took entire charge of the cottage, they would not even consider going home that night. Fanny sat with Miss Radford—who, after one startled look at her radiant nurse’s flowered dinner dress and multicolored earrings, shut her eyes and remained in a kind of obstinate trance—while Maggie rescued the dinner from the stove and set a table in the sitting room upstairs. That was Hunter’s idea, and he helped place and lay it. Clara, passing through, saw that the attic door had been closed. He detained her.
“Come and sit down a minute, Clara, until Knapp gets here, and tell me how the thing happened.”
Clara felt much better; the arrival of the Hunters had changed the whole aspect of things. She had ha
