Harry did think him an old brute, and thanked his stars that neither in mind nor in person did Alice in the smallest degree resemble Mrs. Crossman; he also thought that he should never remember the Colonel’s advice with any other feeling than disgust. Ah! Harry—Harry!
CHAPTER XXIV.—A STORM BREWING.
“H arry! My dear Harry!—Wilkins, where is your master? I told you I must speak to him before he went out, and now you’ve let him go without——”
“Wilkins! where the d——— Oh! Wilkins, what did you do with that bag of snipe-shot I brought down from London?”
Thus apostrophised by an agitated soprano at the drawing-room door, and an impatient tenore robusto in the entrance-hall, Wilkins, the amiable and timid London butler, who had played the character of Job’s comforter to Alice’s Didone abandonata on the memorable evening of the first of September, made two or three steps in the direction of the drawing-room, then twisting round with a sudden jerk, as though he had been worked by machinery with which somebody was playing tricks, rushed frantically into the hall, and handing his master a wrong bag of shot exclaimed, without any breath left—
“This—a—is them, sir; and my mistress—a—says——”
“Swan-shot, you fool—that is, Wilkins, big enough to roll over a bullock! It’s the snipe-shot I’m looking for. No, not that. Don’t you know snipe-shot when you see it? When the scent’s getting duller every minute, too! I ought to have been out these two hours. That’s right, my good fellow: don’t be a month about it—give it me. I shall be home to dinner.”
“But my mistress particularly wishes to speak——” faltered poor Wilkins. Harry, flinging down with an angry gesture the shot-belt he had just filled, and muttering that he had better give up going out at all, strode off to the drawing-room, and putting his head in through the partially opened door, as though he were afraid of being taken prisoner if he trusted himself bodily in the apartment, exclaimed—