'One comfort is, nobody knows your coolness. Nobody comes for all your ringing.'
'Reason good! Every living soul in the house is in the Bishop's meadow, barring the old cat; I seen 'em with their cap-strings flying. But that's nothing. I know where Mother Harewood keeps her tea and sugar;' and he pounced on a tea-caddy of Indian aspect.
'Lance, if you did that to Mettie—'
'Exactly so. I don't;' and he ran out of the room, while Cherry sat up on her sofa, her petulance quite banished between amusement and desperation at such proceedings in a strange house. He came back presently, with two cups, saucers, and plates, apparently picked up at hap-hazard, as no two were alike. 'My dear Lance, where have you been?'
'In the kitchen. Such a jolly arched old hole. Bill and I have done no end of Welsh rabbits there. Once when we were melting some lead, Bill let it drop into the pudding, and the Pater got it at dinner, and said it was the heaviest morsel he ever had to digest.'
'But wasn't it poison?'
'I suppose not, for you see he isn't dead. Another time, when we were melting glue, we upset a whole lot of fat, and the chimney caught fire; and wasn't that a go? Bill got a pistol out of Jack's room, and fired it up the chimney to bring the soot down; and down it came with a vengeance! He was regularly singed, and I do think the place would have been burned if it had not been too old! All the Shapcotes ran out into the court, hallooing Fire! and the engine came, but there was nothing for it to do. Oh, the face Wilmet would make to see that kitchen. Kettle's biling—I must run.'
He came back with an enormous metal tea-pot in one hand, and a boiling kettle in the other, a cloud of vapour about his head.
'You appear in a cloud, like a Greek divinity,' said Cherry, beginning to enter into the humour of the thing.
'Bringing nectar and ambrosia,' said Lance, depositing the kettle amid the furbelows of paper in the grate, and proceeding to brew the tea. 'Excuse the small trifles of milk and cream; and as to bread, I can't find it, but here are the cakes you had for luncheon, shunted off into the passage window. Sugar, Cherry? Fingers were made before tongs. Now I call this jolly.'