“Well, you two will have to wait,” said the boy at last. “It doesn’t so much matter as I’m going to take the clock to pieces again, but all the same, I don’t like missing them.”
He hesitated for a few moments, as to what he should do with the wheels, and ended by reaching in and laying them just beneath the works on one of the squared pieces of oak to which the clock was screwed.
Ten minutes later he was at the rectory porch, where he hung up the keys just inside the hall, and then trotted home with his hands in his pockets to hide their colour.
He was obliged to show them in the kitchen though, where he went to beg a jug of hot-water and some soda.
“Why, where have you been, sir?” cried Martha; “and the dinner kept waiting a whole hour, and orders from your aunt to broil chicken for your tea, as if there wasn’t enough to do, and some soda? I haven’t got any.”
“But you’ve got some, cookie,” said Vane.
“Not a bit, if you speak to me in that disrespectful way, sir. My name’s Martha, if you please. Well, there’s a bit, but how a young gentleman can go on as you do making his hands like a sweep’s I don’t know, and if I was your aunt I’d—”
Vane did not hear what, for he had hurried away with the hot-water and soda, the odour of the kitchen having had a maddening effect upon him, and set him thinking ravenously of the dinner he had missed and the grilled chicken to come.
But there was no reproof for him when, clean and decent once more, he sought the dining-room. Aunt Hannah shook her head, but smiled as she made the tea, and kissed him as he went to her side.
“Why, Vane, my dear, you must be starving,” she whispered. But his uncle was deep in thought over some horticultural problem and did not seem to have missed him. He roused up, though, over the evening meal, while Vane was trying to hide his nails, which in spite of all his efforts looked exceedingly black and like a smith’s.