Evans slammed the door.
Mrs. Dixon dismissed the controversy from her easy mind, looked at the clock, and laid down her knitting.
"Miss Christian'll be looking for her birthday cake!" she said to herself, hoisting her large person from her chair. Even as she did so, there came a rapping, quick and urgent, at the window. "Look at that now!" said Mrs. Dixon. "I wouldn't doubt that child to be wanting the world in her pocket before it was made!"
"Dixie! Dixie! Open the window! Hurry! I want you!"
Christian's face, surmounted by a very old hunting-cap, and decorated with a corked moustache, appeared at the window.
"The Lord save us, child! What have you done to yourself? And what are you doing out there in the wet?" answered Mrs. Dixon, reprovingly; "sure the cake won't be baked for ten minutes yet."
"I don't want the cake. I only want some biscuits, please. Dixie, and hurry! Amazon's bolted, and Cottingham's asked me to catch her! If you had a bone, Dixie, she'd simply——"
Mrs. Dixon was gone. She disapproved exceedingly of Christian's rôle as kennel-boy, but as, since Christian's first birthday, she had never refused her anything, she was not prepared on her tenth to break so well-established a habit.
"I dunno in the world why Mr. Cottingham should make a young lady like you do his business!" she said, putting the requisition bait into Christian's eager, up-stretched hands, "and if your Mamma could see you—"
"Oh, well done, Dixie! What a lovely bone! Oh, thank you most awfully!" interrupted Christian, snatching at the dainties provided, and flitting away through the grey veils of the rain, a preposterous little figure, clad in a ragged kennel-coat, that had been long since discarded by the huntsman, a pair of couples slung round her neck, and a crop in her hand.