二つの魔法：ねじの回転、覆い隠された結末

“He should have been here this hour or more. And so should my fly-away daughter!” Chivers surrounded this description of Miss Prodmore with the deep discretion of silence, then after a moment reflected that silence might be as rash as speech. “Were they coming—a—together, sir?” He had scarcely mended the matter, for his visitor gave an inconsequent stare. “Together?—for what do you take Miss Prodmore?” The young lady’s parent glared about him as if to alight on something else out of place; but the good intentions expressed in every object might have soothed him. “It is in a sense true that their ‘coming together,’ as you call it, is exactly what I’ve made my plans for today. Attended by her trusty maid, Miss Prodmore, who happens to be on a week’s visit to her grandmother at Bellborough, was to take the 1.40 from that place. I was to drive over—ten miles—from the most convenient of my seats. Captain Yule”——the speaker wound up with the mention of the last touch in a masterpiece of his own sketching—“was finally to shake off for a few hours the peculiar occupations that engage him.”

The old man listened with his head askance. “They must be peculiar, sir, when a gentleman comes into a property like this and goes three months without so much as a nat’ral curiosity!” Mr. Prodmore complacently interrupted. “There have repeatedly been people here!” “As you say, sir—to be shown over. With the master himself never shown!” “He shall be, so that nobody can miss him!” Mr. Prodmore hastened to retort. “It will be a mercy indeed to look on him; but I meant that he has not been taken round.” “That’s what I meant too. I’ll take him—round and round: it’s exactly what I’ve come for!” Mr. Prodmore rang out. “He can’t fail to be affected, though he has been up to his neck in such a different class of thing.”

Chivers expressed a timid hope. “In nothing, I dare say, but what’s right, sir——?” “In everything,” Mr. Prodmore distinctly informed him, “that’s wrong! But here he is!” he added with elation as the doorbell again sounded. Chivers hastened to the front, while Mr. Prodmore, left alone, recovered a degree of cheerfulness. The sound he next heard caused him none the less to articulate a certain drop. “Only Cora?—Well, he shan’t, at any rate, resist her!”

Cora Prodmore, who had a great deal of colour in her cheeks and a great deal more in the extremely high pitch of her new, smart clothes, was too much out of breath, too much flurried and frightened, to do more than stammer. “Waited, papa? Oh, I’m sorry!” Her father considered both the idea and her substantial form. “Well, as I shall expect you to put forth all your powers—yes! Some tea.”