At length he succeeded in seating them at the table. Thenceforward there was no difficulty. The ample and diversified cold supper began to disappear steadily, and the wine with it. And as the wine disappeared so did Mr. Cotterill (who had been pompous and taciturn) grow talkative, offering to the company the exact figures of the cost of the house and so forth. But ultimately the sheer joy of life killed arithmetic.
Mrs. Machin, however, could not quite rid herself of the notion that she was in a dream that outraged the proprieties. The entire affair, for an unromantic spot like Bursley, was too fantastically and wickedly romantic.
"We must be thinking about home, Denry," said she.
"Plenty of time," Denry replied. "What! All that wine gone! I 'll see if there 's any more in the sideboard."
He emerged, with a red face, from bending into the deeps of the enamelled sideboard, and a wine-bottle was in his triumphant hand. It had already been opened.
"Hooray!" he proclaimed, pouring a white wine into his glass and raising the glass: "Here 's to the health of Mr. Cecil Wilbraham."
He made a brave tableau in the brightness of the electric light.
Then he drank. Then he dropped the glass, which broke.
"Ugh! What's that?" he demanded, with the distorted features of a gargoyle.
His mother, who was seated next to him, seized the bottle. Denry's hand, in clasping the bottle, had hidden a small label, which said: "Poison. Nettleship's Patent Enamel-Cleaning Fluid. One wipe does it."