“Really I don’t know, sir,” cried Mrs Champernowne, with a perplexed look wrinkling up her pleasant face. “But it won’t take many minutes.”
“Enough, madam, is as good as a feast. This has been a banquet, eh, Pickle? I never enjoyed anything half so much before in my life. The ham was tenderness itself, the eggs new-laid—the bread—the butter—the tea—eh, Pickle?”
“Delicious, uncle.”
“The fat of the land, Mrs Champernowne,” continued the doctor; “the riches of these smiling pastures. Now if your friend Napoleon Bonaparte had come with his locusts to devastate the land, his hordes such as we have seen safely imprisoned yonder—”
“Yes, sir,” interrupted Mrs Champernowne eagerly; “that’s what I came to tell you. I thought I might just run over to my neighbour’s, whose master has come back from the hunt, and I thought that you would like to hear. Those two French prisoners have got right away.”
“Hooray!” shouted Rodd, springing from the chair, and to Mrs Champernowne’s astonishment catching her round the waist and waltzing her about the room. “Three cheers for the poor prisoners! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!”
And Uncle Paul pushed back his chair, puckered up his forehead, stared hard at his nephew, and grunted out—
“Humph!”
“Oh, my dear, don’t! Pray don’t!” panted Mrs Champernowne, whom Nature had made middle-aged, round and plump. “You are taking away all my breath. But my neighbour’s master says that he thinks they have made for Salcombe, where they will perhaps get aboard one of the orange boats and be put back in their own country.”
“Hah!” said Uncle Paul, leaning back in his chair to take hold of his bunch of seals and haul up by the broad watered silk ribbon the big double-cased gold watch that ticked away from where it reclined warm and comfortable at the bottom of his fob.