"As you say, sir--to be shown over. With the master himself never shown!" Chivers dismally commented.
"He _shall_ be, so that nobody can miss him!" Mr. Prodmore, for his own reassurance as well, hastened to retort.
His companion risked a tiny explanation. "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; and his eyes made the lower circuit again, looking as pleased as such a pair of eyes could look with nobody as yet quite good enough either to terrify or to tickle. "He can't fail to be affected, though he _has_ been up to his neck in such a different class of thing."
Chivers clearly wondered awhile what class of thing it could be. Then he 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!" that gentleman added with elation as the doorbell again sounded. Chivers, under the double agitation of the appeal and the disclosure, proceeded to the front as fast as circumstances allowed; while Mr. Prodmore, left alone, would have been observed--had not his solitude been so bleak--to recover a degree of cheerfulness. Cheerfulness in solitude at Covering End was certainly not irresistible, but particular feelings and reasons had pitched, for their campaign, the starched, if now somewhat ruffled, tent of his large white waistcoat. If they had issued audibly from that pavilion, they would have represented to us his consciousness of the reinforcement he might bring up for attack should Captain Yule really resist the house. The sound he next heard from the front caused him none the less, for that matter, to articulate a certain drop. "Only Cora?--Well," he added in a tone somewhat at variance with his "only," "he shan't, at any rate, resist _her_!" This announcement would have quickened a spectator's interest in the young lady whom Chivers now introduced and followed, a young lady who straightway found herself the subject of traditionary discipline. "I've waited. What do you mean?"
Cora Prodmore, who had a great deal of colour in her cheeks and a great deal more--a bold variety of kinds--in the extremely high pitch of her new, smart clothes, meant, on the whole, it was easy to see, very little, and met this challenge with still less show of support either from the sources I have mentioned or from any others. A dull, fresh, honest, overdressed damsel of two-and-twenty, she was too much out of breath, too much flurried and frightened, to do more than stammer: "Waited, papa? Oh, I'm sorry!"