CHAPTER XII.
About an hour after Dr.Panton's arrival, the whole of the party was more or less scattered through the delightful old house, with the exception of Lionel Varick, who had gone off to the village by himself.
But the four ladies finally gathered together in the hall to put in the time between tea and dinner.
Miss Burnaby was soon nodding over a book close to the fire, while Helen Brabazon and Blanche Farrow had brought down their work.

This consisted, as far as Helen was concerned, of a complicated baby's garment destined for the Queen's Needlework Guild.

Blanche, sitting close to Helen, was bending over a frame containing the intricate commencement of a fruit and bird _petit-point_ picture, which, when finished, she intended should form a banner screen for this very room.
Three seven-branched silver candlesticks had now been lighted, and formed pools of soft radiance in the gathering dusk.
After wandering about restlessly for a while, Bubbles ensconced herself far away from the others, in the old carved wood confessional, which had seemed in Donnington's eyes so incongruous and unsuitable an object to form part of the furnishings of a living room.
To Blanche Farrow, the confessional, notwithstanding the beauty of the carving, suggested an irreverent simile--that of a telephone-box.

She told herself that only Bubbles would have chosen such an uncomfortable resting-place.
But when stepping up into what had once been the priest's narrow seat, Bubbles called out that it was delightfully nice and quiet in there, as well as dark--for there still hung over the aperture through which she had just passed a curtain of green silk brocade embroidered with pale passion flowers.
There followed a period of absolute silence and quietude in the room.
Then the door leading from the outside porch opened, and Varick came in.
"I hope I'm not intruding," he exclaimed in his full, resonant voice; and the ladies, with the exception of Bubbles, who remained invisible, looked up and eagerly welcomed him.
During the last few days he had made a real conquest of Miss Burnaby, who, with the one startling exception of the emotion betrayed by her at the seance, secretly struck both him and Blanche Farrow as the most commonplace human being with whom either had ever come in contact.
"I'm quite warm," he said, in answer to the old lady's invitation to come up to the fire.

"I had to go down to the village Post Office to see why the London papers hadn't arrived.