“Oh! what is to be done?” cried Rose. “Dear, dear! why did they send for these people?”
“Why, indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Maylie. “I would not have had them here for the world.”
“All I know is,” said Mr. Losberne at last, sitting down with a kind of desperate calmness, “that we must try and carry it off with a bold face, that’s all. The object is a good one, and that must be the excuse. The boy has strong symptoms of fever upon him, and is in no condition to be talked to any more; that’s one comfort. We must make the best of it we can; and if bad is the best, it is no fault of ours.—Come in.”
“Well, master,” said Blathers, entering the room, followed by his colleague, and making the door fast before he said any more. “This warn’t a put-up thing.”
“And what the devil’s a put-up thing?” demanded the doctor, impatiently.
“We call it a put-up robbery, ladies,” said Blathers, turning to them, as if he compassioned their ignorance, but had a contempt for the doctor’s, “when the servants is in it.”
“Nobody suspected them, in this case,” said Mrs. Maylie.
“Wery likely not, ma’am,” replied Blathers, “but they might have been in it for all that.”
“More likely on that wery account,” said Duff.
“We find it was a town hand,” said Blathers, continuing his report; “for the style of work is first-rate.”