"Not yet," said her husband, "but I can feel it coming on." He cast an eye downward and shivered. "I feared as much. My left leg is all unbuttoned."
"For goodness' sake," said his wife, "don't sit there drivelling——"
"Sorry," said Berry, "but I haven't got a clean bib left. This laundry strike——"
"I said 'drivelling,' not 'dribbling.' You know I did. And what are we wasting time for? Let's do something—anything."
"Right-oh," said her husband. "What about giving the bread some birds?" And with that he picked up a loaf and deliberately pitched it out of the window on to the terrace.
The fact that the casement was not open until after the cast, made his behaviour the more outrageous.
The very wantonness of the act, however, had the excellent effect of breaking the spell of melancholy under which we were labouring.
In a moment all was confusion.
Jill burst into shrieks of laughter; Jonah, who had been immersed in The Times, cursed his cousin for the shock to his nerves; in a shaking voice Daphne assured the butler, whom the crash had brought running, that it was "All right, Falcon; Major Pleydell thought the window was open"; and the delinquent himself was loudly clamouring to be told whether he had won the slop-pail outright or had only got to keep it clean for one year.
Twenty minutes later Jonah had left for Brooch to see the Chief Constable about the missing jewels and arrange for the printing and distribution of an advertisement for Nobby. The rest of us, doing our utmost to garnish a forlorn hope with the seasoning of expectation, made diligent search for the necklace about the terrace, gardens and tennis-lawn. After a fruitless two hours we repaired to the house, where we probed the depths of sofas and chairs, emptied umbrella-stands, settles, flower-bowls and every other receptacle over which our guest might have leaned, and finally thrust an electric torch into the bowels of the piano and subjected that instrument to a thorough examination.