“I mean the house is cold,” said Tench, with a frown. “There’s not enough heat. The furnace needs looking after. Doesn’t somebody stoke it up in the evening?”
Now that furnace was the professor’s bête noire. He had not been able to get a man to look after it, and he had said that he believed he could do it himself. He was not so sure about it now, though, and this humiliating knowledge, combined with just resentment at the other’s tone, caused him to reply with considerable asperity:
“It might be advisable to put on more coal. Perhaps we might so arrange that I should attend to it in the morning, and you should see to it—”
“I?” said Tom Tench. “Not much! I’m a writer. My business is to write, and I have no time for anything else.”
“Mr. Tench—” the professor began sternly, but young Smith rose.
“I’ll have a go at it,” he said, cheerfully, and off he went.
But it was too late. The harm was done; the feud had started. Tom Tench strode off and shut himself into his own room, and Miss Smith interested the professor in a discussion of Hindu myths. She was, Bess thought, the kindest, the jolliest, the most utterly honest, and unaffected soul who ever lived, but she could not dispel the sinister cloud that had come over them. There was tension in the air.
Mr. Smith did not come back. Bess watched the door and listened for a footstep, but none came. At last she slipped out, without disturbing the other two, and went downstairs—not exactly to look for Mr. Smith, of course; but something might have happened to him. He might have fallen down the cellar stairs, he might have been overcome by coal gas.
The lower floor was very quiet. She listened, hesitated for a moment, and then opened the cellar door. A light was burning down there, but there was not a sound to be heard. Cautiously she began to descend the steep stairs—and there she saw the young man, sitting on a box, smoking a pipe, and reading a very frivolous comic magazine.
“Oh!” said she.