“And on your mother’s birthday!” Mr. Povey said further.
“There’s one thing I can do!” he said. “I can burn all this. Built on lies! How dared you?”
And he pitched into the fire—not the apparatus of crime, but the water-colour drawing of a moss-rose and the straws and the blue ribbon for bows at the corners.
“How dared you?” he repeated.
“You never gave me any money,” Cyril muttered.
He thought the marking of coins a mean trick, and the dragging-in of bad trade and his mother’s birthday roused a familiar devil that usually slept quietly in his breast.
“What’s that you say?” Mr. Povey almost shouted.
“You never gave me any money,” the devil repeated in a louder tone than Cyril had employed.
(It was true. But Cyril ‘had only to ask’ and he would have received all that was good for him.)
Mr. Povey sprang up. Mr. Povey also had a devil. The two devils gazed at each other for an instant; and then, noticing that Cyril’s head was above Mr. Povey’s, the elder devil controlled itself. Mr. Povey had suddenly had as much drama as he wanted.