“It’s not quite as bad as that,” he smiled. “But they did not have the exact piece of machinery we wanted and so we are having to make do with what they did have until we reach London.”
He paused before he added,
“It might make us a little slower and I am afraid it means that we will arrive tomorrow afternoon instead of, as I intended, immediately after breakfast.”
As the Earl was speaking, it struck Dalma for the first time that she had never sent a message to her father.
She had intended to tell him that her luggage would arrive before she did and then she thought it was not of any real consequence.
They would obviously keep it, feeling sure that its owner would come for it sooner or later and, as soon as she arrived, her father would send a trap to Tilbury to collect it.
What was
