'Bootless toil,' murmured her cavalier.
'You'd better come, Lord Ernest,' persisted Angela, 'Enlarge your mind! 'Tis a classical dish, always made on wake days.'
'Thank you, I never presume to enter those penetralia,' he answered, likewise with unconscious distance in his tone—excited, perhaps, by the familiar abbreviation of the young lady's name.
'If you are so curious about it, Angela,' said Felix gravely, 'I wonder you do not attend to it!'
'Oh, it is stirring! I left Charlie at it, to console him for the loss of his lobster. I only came out of pure and unrequited philanthropy.'
And she sprang back to the outer kitchen, philosophizing, 'What a queer thing it is that when two swells get together they must be on their dignity, and act as if they came out of some other planet.'
'Better be a swell than a cinder,' said Charlie. 'Mrs. Hodnet, is this stuff stirred enough? I've been at it like a galley-slave till my arms are ready to drop.'
'I'll stir the infirmary!' loudly declared Kester, intercepted on his way by his uncle Will, who hoisted him up, in an ecstasy of amusement, as a 'true grandson of his grandmother, which he wasn't.' The two rooms resounded with merriment, and Felix regaled Gertrude with a few of Mrs. Harewood's proverbial malapropisms; but the pair in the window remained utterly unconscious of all that was passing.
'The odd thing is,' said Angela confidentially to Charles Audley, 'that I know those two regularly hate each other.'
'It looks very like it!'