“Right there,” he answered. “I've ordered the limousine round, with the foot-warmer and fur rugs.”
“I guess a day wouldn't really matter much,” said Mrs. Bowse, good-naturedly. “Perhaps it might be better to-morrow.”
“And perhaps it mightn't,” said Tembarom, eating “break-fast-food” with a cheerful appetite. “What you can't be stone-cold sure of to-morrow you drive a nail in to-day.”
He ate a tremendous breakfast as a discreet precautionary measure. The dark dining-room was warm, and the food was substantial. It was comfortable in its way.
“You'd better hold the hall door pretty tight when you go out, and don't open it far,” said Mrs. Bowse as he got up to go. “There's wind enough to upset things.”
Tembarom went out in the hall, and put on his insufficient overcoat. He buttoned it across his chest, and turned its collar up to his ears. Then he bent down to turn up the bottoms of his trousers.
“A pair of arctics would be all to the merry right here,” he said, and then he stood upright and saw Little Ann coming down the staircase holding in her hand a particularly ugly tar-tan-plaid woolen neck-scarf of the kind known in England as a “comforter.”
“If you are going out in this kind of weather,” she said in her serene, decided little voice, “you'd better wrap this comforter right round your neck, Mr. Tembarom. It's one of Father's, and he can spare it because he's got another, and, besides, he's not going out.”
Tembarom took it with a sudden emotional perception of the fact that he was being taken care of in an abnormally luxurious manner.
“Now, I appreciate that,” he said. “The thing about you. Little Ann, is that you never make a wrong guess about what a fellow needs, do you?”