"Art sure it isn't a sheep's kidney, lass?" James had asked, carefully imitating Helen's nonchalance.
"Yes," she had said. "I gather you are not passionately fond of kidneys, great-stepuncle?" she had asked.
"I was once. What art going to do, lass?"
"I'm going to get our tea," she had said.
At the words, our tea, the antique James Ollerenshaw, who had never thought to have such a sensation again, was most distinctly conscious of an agreeable, somewhat disturbing sensation of being tickled in the small of his back.
"Well," he had asked her, "what can I do?"
"You can go out," she had replied. "Wouldn't it be a good thing for you to go out for a walk? Tea will be ready at half-past four."
"I go for no walk," he said, positively....
"Yes, that's all right," she had murmured, but not in response to his flat refusal to obey her. She had been opening the double cupboard and the five drawers which constituted the receptacles of the scullery-larders; she had been spying out the riches and the poverty of the establishment. Then she had turned to him, and, instead of engaging him in battle, she had just smiled at him, and said: "Very well. As you wish. But do go into the front room, at any rate."
And there he was in the middle room, the kitchen, listening to her movements behind the door. He heard the running of water, and then the mild explosion of lighting the second ring of the gas-stove; the first had been lighted by Mrs. Butt. Then he heard nothing whatever for years, and when he looked at the clock it was fourteen minutes past four. In the act of looking at the clock, his eye had to traverse the region of the sofa. On the sofa were one parasol and two gloves. Astonishing, singular, disconcerting, how those articles—which, after all, bore no kind of resemblance to any style of furniture or hangings—seemed, nevertheless, to refurnish the room, to give the room an air of being thickly inhabited which it never had before!