[p 72]
]‘You must ask him to stay for dinner, of course,’ Dot said. ‘He’s had pleurisy and can’t go home in the rain. It’s lucky there’s roast fowl to-day, and I’ll open a bottle of those apricots.’
Larrie was sulkily taking off his mackintosh as she talked.
‘What the deuce brought him here?’ he said. Dot said ‘H’sh,’ and gave him a little poke to remind him of the proximity of the drawing-room.
‘I’ll tell you after,’ she said. ‘I must go back now, I’ve left him alone with baby, and perhaps he’s not educated up to them.’
He went kitchenward to ask for dry boots, and Peggie was dishing up. The appetising smell reminded him he was too hungry to tell her to keep things in the oven on the chance of the visitor going. And as he went back again up the hall he saw the weather was too abominable to turn a dog out. But he said ‘Confound it’ under his breath outside the door, as necessary preparation to pressing Mr Sullivan Wooster to stay to dinner.
[p 73]
]CHAPTER VII
A POCKET MADAME MELBA
‘Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight.’
Larrie had not yet taken Dot in his arms as he had intended that afternoon, and he had not asked her to begin afresh, so the result was still ‘dead level.’
But Dot was no longer unhappy. Every minute of her time was filled, and with a real object now in life, she felt she had been childish to waste so many hours in weeping and dwelling on imaginary differences in Larrie’s manner.