A.he could not bear Mrs. Sappleton’s chattering.B.he su……
TEXT A
She broke off with a
little shudder. It was a relief to Framton Nuttel when the aunt bustled into the
room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her
appearance.
"I hope Vera has been amusing you" she
said.
"She has been very interesting," said Framton.
"I hope you don’t mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly. "My
husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come
in this way. They’ve been out for snipe in the marshes today, so they’ll make a
fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you menfolk, isn’t it"
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds,
and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible.
He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to
a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a
fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the
open window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence
that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.
"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental
excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical
exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread
delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least
detail of one’s infirmities, their cause and cure. "On the matter of diet they
are not so much in agreement," be continued.
"No" said Mrs.
Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last moment. Then she
suddenly brightened into alert attention--but not to what Framton was
saying.
"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for
tea, and don’t they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look
intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through
the open window with a dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless
fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn
towards the window, they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was
additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown
spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a
hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you
bound"
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall
door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his
headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to a
void imminent collision.
"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer
of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window, "fairly muddy, but most
of it’s dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up"
"A most
extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton, "could only talk about
his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of goodbye or apology when you
arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."
"I expect it was
the spaniel," said the niece calmly. "He told me he had a horror of dogs. He was
once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of
pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures
snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose
their nerve."
Romance at short notice was her
speciality.
Framion dashed off without a word of goodbye or apology because ______.
A.he could not bear Mrs. Sappleton’s chattering.
B.he suffered from a severe mental illness.
C.he was afraid of the brown spaniel.
D.he was horrified by the three men.