“What’s she want to say anything for, if she don’t mean anything then, eh?” grumbled Edward. “I hate such ways.”
Cook looked at housemaid, and slightly raised her hands, while the offended dignitary sipped and muttered, and muttered and sipped, and his audience waited, not daring to speak, lest they should miss the rest of the expected treat.
“I wouldn’t say another word if I hadn’t begun, that I wouldn’t!” growled the hard-faced one. “Now, then, where’d I got to?”
“‘Show me in to your mistress,’” exclaimed cook; when “Mr Eddard,” turning round upon her very sharply, she shrunk as it were into her shell, and nipped together her lips.
“I tell you what it is,” said Edward viciously; “if I’m to tell this here, I tells it, but I ain’t going to be driven wild with vexatious interruptions. Do you both want to know it, or don’t you?”
“O yes, please, Mr Eddard, we do indeed,” exclaimed the two domestics; “so please go on!”
Thus adjured, and apparently mollified by the respect paid to him, as much as by the stewpan essence, “Mr Eddard” continued: “Well, I shows him into the breakfast-room, and then goes in to missus, who had just come down from Miss Bedford’s room; and looking all white and troubled, she goes across the hall, and I opens the door for her, and up comes my gentleman with a rush, catches her hand in his, and kisses it.
“‘That’s making yourself at home anyhow, young man,’ I says to myself, backing-out of the room; and I can’t say how it happened, but the corner of the carpet got rucked up, so that I was ever so long before I could get the door shut, and they would keep talking, so that I couldn’t help hearing what they said.”
“And what did they say?” said cook.
“Ain’t I a-coming to it as fast as I can?” said Edward angrily. “What an outrageous hurry you always are in with everything, except getting the dinner ready in time!”