But before Patty could get half-way up the kitchen-stairs, she heard the front door opened, and a gruff voice exclaimed—
“For Mr Morrison, and wait for an answer.”
“Next door,” said Jared, in a disappointed tone.
“Why don’t you get yer numbers painted over again, then?” grunted the voice, which seemed to consider an apology as a work of supererogation. “Who’s to tell eights from nines, I should like to know?”
“No message for any one of the name of Pellet, eh?” said Jared.
The visitor muttered something inaudible, and then came the noise of a heavy thump on the door of the next house, when Jared sighed, closed his own door, and turned to meet Patty.
“I would not have that man’s unpleasant disposition for a trifle, my child, that I would not,” said Jared; and then he descended to find his wife in tears, Patty trying hard the while to keep her own back; and, do what he could, Jared Pellet, organist of St Runwald’s, could not pull out a stop that should produce a cheerful strain where all seemed sadness and woe.
The tea was fragrant, though weak; the toast just brown enough without being burned; while the children ate bread and dripping, just as if—Mrs Jared said—it grew upon the hedges.
But the social meal was now unsocial to a degree. Mrs Pellet hardly spoke, while Jared drank his tea mechanically—three cups—and would have gone on pouring it down for any length of time, if a reference to the Dutch clock had not shown the time to be a quarter to six.
Jared hurriedly rose, to keep his appointment at the church, and prepared to start.