She again communed with their silent witnesses. "I really don't quite know, but I think that at Granny's she eats too much."
"I'll soon put an end to _that_!" Mr. Prodmore returned with decision. "You expect then to pursue your adventures quite into the night--to return to Bellborough as you came?"
The girl had by this time begun a little to find her feet. "Exactly as I came, papa dear,--under the protection of a new friend I've just made, a lady whom I met in the train and who is also going back by the 6.19. She was, like myself, on her way to this place, and I expected to find her here."
Mr. Prodmore chilled on the spot any such expectations. "What does she want at this place?"
Cora was clearly stronger for her new friend than for herself. "She wants to see it."
Mr. Prodmore reflected on this complication. "Today?" It was practically presumptuous. "Today won't do."
"So I suggested," the girl declared. "But do you know what she said?"
"How should I know," he coldly demanded, "what a nobody says?"
But on this, as if with the returning taste of a new strength, his daughter could categorically meet him. "She's not a nobody. She's an American."
Mr. Prodmore, for a moment, was struck: he embraced the place, instinctively, in a flash of calculation. "An American?"
He knew all about that. "Americans mostly _are_!"
"I mean," said Cora, "to see this place. 'Wild' was what she herself called it--and I think she also said she was 'mad.'"
"She gave"--Mr. Prodmore reviewed the affair--"a fine account of herself! But she won't do."
The effect of her new acquaintance on his companion had been such that she could, after an instant, react against this sentence. "Well, when I told her that this particular day perhaps wouldn't, she said it would just _have_ to."
"Have to do?" Mr. Prodmore showed again, through a chink, his speculative eye. "For _what_, then, with such grand airs?"
"Why, I suppose, for what Americans want."
He measured the quantity. "They want everything."
"Then I wonder," said Cora, "that she hasn't arrived."
"When she does arrive," he answered, "I'll tackle her; and I shall thank you, in future, not to take up, in trains, with indelicate women of whom you know nothing."
"Oh, I did know something," his daughter pleaded; "for I saw her yesterday at Bellborough."