"I didn't notice him—" began Philippa, but at this moment we were shot into the yard by pressure from behind. Mr. Armstrong took his stand on a packing-case, the people hived in round him, and I saw my wife no more.
Coils of fencing wire and sheets of corrugated iron were proffered, and left the audience cold; a faint interest was roused when the auctioneer's clerk held up one of a party of zinc pails for inspection.
"You'd count the stars through that one!" said a woman beside me.
"You can buy it for a telescope, ma'am!" said Mr. Armstrong swiftly.
"Well, well, hasn't he a very fine delivery!" said my neighbour, regarding Mr. Armstrong as if he were a landscape.
"Hannah," said the woman on my other hand, in a deep and reproachful contralto, speaking as if I did not exist, "did ye let the kitchen chairs go from you?"
"There wasn't one o' them but had a leg astray," apologised Hannah—"they got great hardship. When Harrington 'd have a drop taken he'd throw them here and there."
"Ladies! Ladies!" reproved Mr. Armstrong. "Is this an oxtion or is it a conversassiony? John! show that ladder."
"A big lot of use a forty-foot ladder'd be to the people round this place!" said a superior young farmer in a new suit of clothes; "there isn't a house here, unless it's my father's, would have any occasion for it."
Hannah dug me hard in the ribs with her elbow and put out her tongue.