"Ethel gave them to me."
"Take 'em off quick! Mother, you see to it that she wears respectable collars!"
Posy removed two strings of large amethystine beads. Quinney took them and hurled them into the fireplace. Tears rolled down Posy's blooming cheeks. She was unaccustomed to violence—a primitive weapon not to be despised by modern man.
"Them beads," said Quinney, who reverted to the diction of his youth when excited, "is beastly—sinfully beastly! They stand for all that I despise; they stand for the cheap, trashy talk which you've been defilin' your mind with. What you need is a good spankin'. Now, mother, I leave Miss Impudence with you. Mark well what I say. No more Honeybunning!"
II
It is significant that Quinney neglected his business that memorable morning in the interests of a child who was beginning to believe that she occupied a back seat in her father's mind. After leaving the dining-room, he clapped on his hat, and betook himself straightway to St. James's Square. There was only one man in all London to whom he could go for honest advice, and fortunately he happened to be in town for the season.
Lord Mel received him graciously.
Quinney stated his case quietly. During the course of the narrative Lord Mel smiled more than once, but his sympathies were entirely with the father, for he had endured, not too patiently, somewhat similar scenes with his own daughters. Moreover, he hated Honeybun, whom he had denounced in the Upper Chamber as a mischievous and unscrupulous demagogue.
Quinney ended upon a high note of interrogation:
"What shall I do with her, my lord?"