TWO:He found Emmeline alone, just beginning to make tea in the heavily fluted tea-pot with its equipage of harlequin cups and saucers. Alice and John were somewhere in the ��grounds.�� Hugh had gone to see his young lady (the expression was Mrs Keeling��s), and she herself had suffered a slight eclipse from her usual geniality owing to her mother having stopped the whole afternoon, and having thus interrupted her reading, by which she meant going gently to sleep on the sofa, with her book periodically falling off her lap. The first two times that this happened she almost invariably picked it up, on the third occasion she{48} had really gone to sleep, and the rumble of its avalanche did not disturb her. But the loss of this intellectual refreshment had rendered her rather querulous, and since she was not of very vigorous vitality, her querulousness oozed in a leaky manner from her instead of discharging itself at high pressure. A tea-leaf had stuck, too, in the spout of the tea-pot, which made that handsome piece contribute to the general impression of dribbling at Mrs Keeling��s tea-table; it also provided her with another grievance, though not quite so acute as that which took its rise from what had occurred at lunch.��I want to ask your pardon, Miss Propert,�� he said, ��for my conduct to you this morning. I am sure you did not charge me more than your work was worth. I like your design very much. I shall be truly grateful to you if you will let me have that plate. I am sorry. That��s all.... I am sorry.��