“Oh!—h’m!—ah! I say—awfully sorry! Didn’t know, really—have put my foot in it—must be more careful,” cried the mischievous dog, in tones of mock consternation.
“You’re a perfect horror!” cried Gertie, laughing, and blushing furiously. “I declare I’ll never speak to you again?”
“And was that Claverton, too?” tranquilly asked the owner of the patronymic in question. For Jessie Garrett, who had also been with Armitage and Gertie, now arrived on the scene—having lingered behind a little—similarly adorned.
“What a mischievous fellow he is!” cried Jim’s wife, who had just come up. “We ought to make him go without his dinner.”
“Or duck him—he deserves ducking,” put in Jessie Garrett. “Mr Claverton; can’t some of you duck him?”
“Too hot for any such violent exertion,” replied Claverton, nonchalantly, as he turned away, and sat down on the ground by the side of Lilian Strange, while old Garrett was heard to remark that “young fellers would ’ave their fun.”
“Do you know, I’m a shocking bad waiter,” he observed. “I invariably upset everything—cut over a wing of chicken into somebody’s lap, or pour a tumbler full of liquid down their back, or shoot some one opposite bang in the eye with a soda-water cork.”
“But to-day you won’t do any of these things,” laughed Lilian. “And you seem to have taken care of me pretty well.”
“Have I? As a rule, on these occasions, I skulk in the background, and pretend not to know that people have begun to feed. Then, when they are well under weigh, some motherly soul spots me, and makes a descent upon me, singing out: ‘Why, I declare, you haven’t got anything. Do come and have some of this and of that, and so on;’ and I find myself looked after as if I was the prodigal calf—prodigal son. I mean—same thing. Thus the public back is saved from a baptism of soda-water, and I from making an ass of myself, and every one’s happy.”
“Don’t be so utterly absurd,” said Lilian, laughing as if she could never stop.