"Oh! Hurrah!" cried Hilda. "At last I've got somebody who takes my side."
"Of course you say it's impossible. You naturally would----" Ingpen resumed.
He was interrupted by the entrance of George. Soon after Tertius Ingpen's arrival, George had been despatched to summon urgently Mrs. Tams, the charwoman who had already more than once helped to fill a hiatus between two cooks. George showed now no trace of his late martyrdom, nor of a headache. To conquer George in these latter days you had to demand of him a service. It was Edwin who had first discovered the intensity of the boy's desire to take a useful share in any adult operation whatever. He came in red-cheeked, red-handed, rough, defiant, shy, proud, and making a low intermittent "Oo-oo" noise with protruding lips to indicate the sharpness of the frost outside. As he had already greeted Ingpen he was able to go without ceremony straight to his chair.
Confidentially, in the silence, Hilda raised her eyebrows to him interrogatively. In reply he gave one short nod. Thus in two scarcely perceptible gestures the assurance was asked for and given that the mission had been successful and that Mrs. Tams would be coming up at once. George loved these private and laconic signallings, which produced in him the illusion that he was getting nearer to the enigma of life.
As he persisted in the "Oo-oo" manifestation, Hilda amicably murmured:
"Hsh-hsh!"
George pressed his lips swiftly and hermetically together, and raised his eyebrows in protest against his own indecorum. He glanced at his empty place; whereupon Hilda glanced informingly in the direction of the fire, and George, skilled in the interpretation of minute signs, skirted stealthily round the table behind his mother's chair, and snatched his loaded plate from the hearth.
Nobody said a word. The sudden stoppage of the conversation had indeed caused a slight awkwardness among the elders. George, for his part, was quite convinced that they had been discussing his eyesight.
"Furnace all right again, sonny?" asked Edwin, quietly, when the boy had sat down. Hilda was replenishing Ingpen's plate.
"Blop!" muttered George, springing up aghast. This meant that he had forgotten the furnace in the cellar, source of heat to the radiator in the hall. By a recent arrangement he received sixpence a week for stoking the furnace.