not words. Pack—and that right speedily.”
“I have packed, sir.”
“Find out when there is a train for Cambridge.”
“There is one in forty minutes, sir.”
“Call a taxi.”
“A taxi is at the door, sir.”
“Good!” I said. “Then lead me to it.”
The Maison Pringle was quite a bit of a way out of Cambridge, a mile or two down the Trumpington Road; and when I arrived everybody was dressing for dinner. So it wasn’t till I had shoved on the evening raiment and got down to the drawing-room that I met the gang.
“Hullo-ullo!” I said, taking a deep breath and floating in.
I tried to speak in a clear and ringing voice, but I wasn’t feeling my chirpiest.
It is always a nervous job for a diffident and unassuming bloke to visit a strange house for the first time; and it doesn’t make the thing any better when he goes there pretending to be another fellow.
I was conscious of a rather pronounced sinking feeling, which the appearance of the Pringles did nothing to allay.
Sippy had described them as England’s premier warts, and it looked to me as if he might be about right. Professor Pringle was a thinnish, baldish, dyspeptic-lookingish cove with an eye like a haddock, while Mrs. Pringle’s aspect was that of one who had had bad news round about the year 1900 and never really got over it. And