"I don't doubt but wot I'll be very comfortable," remarked the big man contentedly. "'Ere, catch 'old, Charley," he cried, tossing the lad a colander, possessed of more holes than the manufacturer had ever dreamed of.
Charley turned too late, and the colander caught a geranium which, alone among its fellows, had shown a half-hearted tendency to bloom. That particular flower was Mrs. Bindle's ewe-lamb.
"Ain't 'e a knock-out?" cried the big man, pausing for a moment to gaze at his offspring. "Don't take after 'is pa, and that's a fact," and he exposed three or four dark-brown stumps of teeth.
"P'raps you ain't 'is father," giggled a feminine voice at the end of the queue.
The big man turned in the direction from which the voice had come, stared stolidly at an inoffensive little man, who had "not guilty" written all over him, then, deliberately swinging round, he lifted a small wicker clothes-basket from the cart.
"'Ere, catch it, Charley," he cried, and without waiting to assure himself of Charley's willingness or ability to do so, he pitched it over the railings.
Charley turned just in time to see the basket coming. He endeavoured to avoid it, tripped over the colander, and sat down in the centre of the geranium-bed, carrying riot and desolation with him.
"Ain't you a——" but Charley was never to know how he appeared to his father at that moment.
Observing that several heads were turned towards the front door, the eyes of the big man had instinctively followed their direction. It was what he saw there that had caused him to pause in describing his offspring.
Standing very still, her face deathly pale, with no sign of her lips beyond a thin, grey line, stood Mrs. Bindle, her eyes fixed upon the geranium-bed and the desolation reigning there. Her breath came in short jerks.