“Yes; she was shouting ‘Grass-eye—grass-eye!’ What did she mean?”
“I’d told her before tea that Mr Boxall had a glass eye, and if she was good maybe he’d take it out and show it to her.”
“Oh, that was it, was it?” said Doris. Then the pair ceased conversation and hung, leaning over the banister rails, in silence, watching the dishes going in and coming out.
Patsy was greatly in evidence going and coming, and so busy that he never once glanced up. He was carrying, just now, a vol au vent in a silver dish; he paused in his passage across the hall with it, sniffed at it, stuck his thumb in it, sucked his thumb, wiped it on the side of his trousers, and then vanished into the dining-room with the dish.
“I hope the old General will have some of that,” murmured Doris.
CHAPTER XVI
IN THE “SCRUBBERY”
General Grampound and Mr Boxall were non-smokers, and as Mr Boxall was also a teetotaler, and the General was talking politics, Dicky Fanshawe found things rather dull in the dining-room when the ladies had withdrawn.
Things were almost as dull in the drawing-room, for Lady Seagrave was deaf, and Lady Molyneux was stupid.
I must have presented Patsy very badly if you have not discovered that he was the possessor of an “eye”—the eye of an observer. The faculty of observation given to him by nature and developed amongst the wild things of the woods was exercised to the full amidst the new surroundings in which he found himself.