"Glory be to Moses! Look at my grandmother!" said Flurry under his breath. "How fragile she is! Who the dickens has she got hold of?"
"He thinks she's deaf, anyhow," said Sally.
"That's where he makes the mistake!" returned Flurry.
"I don't see your glawss, Mrs. Knox," shouted the stout gentleman.
"That's very possible," replied the incisive and slightly cracked voice of Mrs. Knox, "because the little that is left of it is in the mortar on the wall, to keep thieves out, which it fails to do."
The pair passed on, and paused, still in high converse, at the asparagus beds; Mullins, behind the bath-chair, wiped her indignant brow.
"You'll go home without the asparagus," whispered Flurry, "she has every stick of it counted by now!"
They moved on, heading for the further gate of the garden.
"I'll bet a sovereign he's come after the house!" Flurry continued, following the _cortège_ with a malevolent eye.
Later, when we returned to the house, we found a motor-bicycle, dusty and dwarfish, leaning against the hall door steps. Within was the sound of shouting. It was then half-past seven.
"Is it possible that she's keeping him for dinner?" said Sally.
"Take care he's not staying for the night!" said Flurry. "Look at the knapsack he has on the table!"
"There's only one room he can possibly have," said Mrs. Flurry, with a strange and fixed gaze at her lord, "and that's the James the Second room. The others are cleared for the painters."
"Oh, that will be all right," replied her lord, easily.
When I came down to dinner I found the new arrival planted on his short, thick legs in front of the fireplace, still shouting at Mrs. Knox, who, notwithstanding the sinister presence of the two shawls of ill-omen, was listening with a propitious countenance. She looked very tired, and I committed the _gaucherie_ of saying I was sorry to hear she had not been well.
"Oh, that was nothing!" said Mrs. Knox, with a wave of her tiny, sunburnt, and bediamonded hand. "I've shaken that off, 'like dewdrops from the lion's mane!' This is Mr. Tebbutts, from--er--England, Major Yeates."
Mr. Tebbutts, after a bewildered stare, presumably in search of the lion, proclaimed his gratification at meeting me, in a voice that might have been heard in the stable yard.