Eliza stared at him resentfully. She did not show surprise, because that was an emotion she seldom displayed, but she disapproved highly of his tone.
“I did not know what else to do with it, sir,” she answered.
“No, no; of course not.” John Musgrave seized an egg, and decapitated it with a shaking hand. “Take it with you, please,” he said, in a mollified voice.
“Oh, thank you, sir,” Eliza murmured, with a twist of her thin lips which was the only trick of smiling they knew.
He turned in his seat and stared at her fixedly.
“Tell Martha from me,” he said curtly, “to throw that litter on the fire. I don’t like cut flowers, and I do not eat fruit. If—if anything else of the kind arrives, do not take it in.”
Eliza carried the rejected offering with her to the kitchen, where Martha and the chauffeur lingered over a late breakfast, and simperingly displayed the gift which she bore in the angular crook of her arm.
“The master gave them to me,” she announced, with the conscious intonation of one marked out for especial favour.
The chauffeur was in the act of drinking coffee, but something went wrong with his throat at this moment, and Eliza, who was fastidious, turned aside from the unpleasant spectacle he presented, and buried her nose in the flowers. Martha good-naturedly thumped him on the back.
“Oh Lord?” he gasped. “Oh Lord?”