I'll tell you what I'm going to do."

He had piloted the colonel into the library, and Anne and Lydia were
disappearing into the dining-room where Mary Nellen was now supreme. The
colonel called them, imperatively. There was such a note of necessity in
his voice that they felt sure he didn't know how to deal, quite by
himself, with this unknown quantity of a son.

"Girls, come here. I have to have my girls," he said to Jeffrey, "when
anything's going to be talked over. They're the head of the house and my
head, too."

The girls came proudly, if unwillingly. They knew the scowling young man
didn't need them, might not want them indeed. But they were a part of
Farvie, and he'd got to accept them until they found out, at least, how
safe Farvie was going to be in his hands. Jeffrey wasn't thinking of
them at all. He was accepting them, but they hadn't any share in his
perspective. Lydia felt they were the merest little dots there. She
giggled, one brief note to herself, and then sobered. She was as likely
to laugh as to fume, and it began to seem very funny to her that in this
drama of The Prisoner's Return she and Anne were barely to have speaking
parts. The colonel sat in his armchair at the orchard window, and
Jeffrey stood by the mantel and fingered a vase. Lydia, for the first
time seeing his hands with a recognising eye, was shocked by them. They
were not gentleman's hands, she thought. They were worn, and had
calloused stains and ill-kept nails.

"I thought you'd like to know as soon as possible what I mean to do," he
said, addressing his father.

"I'm glad you've got your plans," his father said. "I've tried to make
some, but I couldn't--couldn't."

"I want first to find out just how things are here," said Jeffrey. "I
want to know how much you've got to live on, and whether these girls
have anything, and whether they want to stay on with you or whether
they're doing it because--" Jeffrey now had a choking sense of emotions
too big for him--"because there's no other way out."

"Do you mean," said Lydia, in a burst, before Anne's warning hand could
stop her, "you want us to leave Farvie?"

The colonel looked up with a beseeching air.

"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey irritably. "I only want to know the state
of things here. So I can tell what to do."

The colonel had got hold of himself, and straightened in his chair. The
girls knew that motion. It meant, "Come, come, you derelict old body.
Get into form."