Mr Musgrave with the utmost gravity pointed to the door at his back.
“Diogenes is in there,” he announced. “I forgot his feeding time.”
Martha gasped.
“In the drawing-room, sir?” she ejaculated.
“I was lonely,” Mr Musgrave explained. From force of long habit he treated Martha as a tried and trusted friend. “I find him companionable.”
“Lor’!” remarked Martha. She scrutinised her master attentively, the idea that he must be sickening for something suggesting itself to her mind. “Dogs are company, that’s certain,” she said. “When he’s ’ad ’is supper you’d like ’im back in the drawing-room, I suppose, sir?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I think he is sufficiently at home now to be allowed to run about as he likes.”
Martha took Diogenes to the kitchen and fed him, contemplating him with renewed interest while he gnawed his bones under the table.
“There’s something about that hanimal as I don’t understand,” she mused. “If that ain’t the same dog, though different, as burst in after the cat with the young lady from the ’All, I’ll eat my apron. It’s the same young lady comes to see ’im, anyway. If it isn’t ’er dog what does she come for? And if it is ’er dog what’s the master doing with it? It’s my belief,” she further reflected, wiping the perspiration from her face with the apron she had dedicated to gastronomic purposes, “that the master is courtin’ the young lady, or the young lady is courtin’ the master, through that blessed dog. Now I wonder,” and Martha turned to the stove and went through mysterious manoeuvres with the vessels upon it, “how that will work? Come to my time o’ life and his, change—that kind of change—makes for trouble as a rule.”
Small wonder that in the disturbed preoccupation of his cook’s mind Mr Musgrave’s dinner that night suffered in the cooking. But Mr Musgrave was himself too preoccupied to notice this; the business of eating had no interest for him.