"Quel tapage! Mon Dieu, quel br-r-ruit!"
"Oui!" cries Smeaton, pointing at her excitedly with the nut-crackers. "Et vous en êtes la cause!"
"Do you remember your Yankee friend's dictum on the little point of manners we've been discussing?" Mackworth asked me when order was restored. He was a dark, depressed man, perhaps the richest who dined at the À-peu-près regularly, and had written the most talked-about novel of the year before last.
"By the way," interrupted Smeaton, whose manners are bad, "who's seen Ingram lately?"
"I saw him—to-day," I answered, balancing the spoon on my coffee-cup.
"What's he doing? I thought he'd gone back to the States."
"He followed a growler I took from Victoria and wanted to carry in my trunk. Would have had to fight another man, too, for the sixpence."
Madame could not have desired a more complete cessation of turmoil than followed these words of mine. In more than one pair of eyes I saw the panic that would be my own lasting shame rise suddenly, and as suddenly be checked. I wonder how they got it under.
"Was he very bad?" asks Smeaton, in a low voice. "Down—right down?"
I nodded.