Chapter Twenty-FourUpon one pretext or another the family had been assembled in the drawing-room. Outside the day was dark and lowering. Within, though a bright fire burned on the hearth, there was a chill, a feeling of uneasiness.
Richard Treherne was the last to appear. They had waited for him in a silence which no one except Mabel seemed inclined to break. Cosmo Frith picked up the clock from the mantelpiece, remarked that it needed regulating, and busied himself with it.
‘Cosmo can’t keep his hands off a clock,’ Mabel complained. ‘I believe he winds his own every time he goes near it.’ To which Miss Maud Silver replied that in her opinion clocks should be wound once a week and never touched in between.
Mabel Wadlow, who still reclined amongst her cushions and had apparently neither
