The Jervaise Comedy

He was looking round, searching for some one who was not there.

"Want any help?" Hughes asked.

"No, thanks. That's all right. I know where the car is, I mean," Ronnie said, and still hesitated as if he were going to finish the question he had begun in his previous speech.

Olive Jervaise anticipated, I think wrongly, his remark. "They're in the drawing-room," she said. "Will you tell them?"

"Better get the car round first, hadn't I?" Ronnie asked.

The sandy Atkinson youth found an answer for that. He cleared his long, thin throat huskily and said, "Might save time to tell 'em first. They'd be ready, then, when you came round." His two equally sandy sisters clucked their approval.

"All serene," Ronnie agreed.

He was on the bottom step of the stairs when the Hall door was thrown wide open and Frank Jervaise returned.

He stood there a moment, posed for us, searching the ladder of