"Ho!" replied the ruffled Mr Vick, feeling much as the Emperor Nero might have felt on being requested by the most recently immured early Christian to see that the arena lions were kept a bit quieter to-morrow night—"ho, indeed!"
"Them's your orders, Mr Vick," said Mr Windebank, resuming the peculiar dental obligato which seems to be the inseparable accompaniment of the toilet of a horse, temporarily suspended on this occasion to enable the performer to discharge his little broadside.
Mr Vick turned off various taps and switches on his dash-board, and the humming of the engine ceased.
"I take my orders," he proclaimed in majestic tones, "from the master and missus direct, and from nobody else."
Mr Windebank, after spending some moments in groping for a crushing rejoinder, replied—
"Well, you'd better go inside and get 'em. And you'd better 'ang a nosebag on your sparking-plug in the meanwhile," he added, with sudden and savage irrelevance.
Mr Vick adopted the former of these two suggestions, with the result that at the hour of noon the car slid submissively round to the front of the Hall. Presently Daphne appeared, and disregarding the door which Mr Vick was holding open for her, stepped up into the driver's seat—the throne itself—and took the wheel in her vigorous little hands.
"I am going to drive, Vick," she observed cheerfully.
Mr Vick preserved his self-control and smiled faintly.
"I suppose you have a licence, my lady?" he inquired.