“Why, you’re a little Cole from next door.”
“Yes,” said Jeremy. “I thought this was our pantry and it was yours. Wait a minute. I’m going to sneeze.” This he did, and then hurried on breathlessly: “Please let me go now and I’ll come in to-morrow and explain everything and pay for the cups and saucers. But I don’t want them to know that I’ve been out.”
“Here, pick the bits up at once,” she said, “or somebody will be cutting themselves. It’s just like that maid, having it out on the table. That settles it. She shall leave to-morrow.”
She put down the candle and pistol on the table, and then watched him while he picked up the pieces. They were not very many.
“And now please may I go?” said Jeremy again. “I didn’t mean to come into your house. I didn’t really. I’ll explain everything to-morrow.”
“No, you won’t,” said Miss Mackenzie grimly. “You’ll explain here and now. That’s a pretty thing to come breaking into somebody’s house after midnight, and then thinking you can go out just as easily as you came in. . . . You can sit down,” she said as a kind of afterthought, pointing to a chair.
“It isn’t anything really,” said Jeremy very quickly. “I mean that it isn’t anything you need mind. They dared me to run round the cathedral twice when the clock struck twelve, and I did it, and ran home and climbed into your house by mistake.”
“Who’s they?” asked Miss Mackenzie, gathering her quilt more closely about her.
“Bill Bartlett and Ernest Sampson,” he said, as though that must tell her everything. “The Dean’s son, you know; and I don’t like him, so when he dares me to anything I must do it, you see.”
“I don’t see at all,” said Miss Mackenzie. “It was a very wicked and silly thing to do. There are plenty of people I don’t like, but I don’t run round the cathedral just to please them.”