“I’m not a water-carrier.”
“How can you laugh? It’s a question of life and death. Surely there must be a pond somewhere.”
“You know there’s nothing hereabouts. Why, you used to come to Kelcott to sell water at a halfpenny a pint. Don’t you remember? You bought me a monkey-on-a-stick out of the profits.”
“How you babble! Then I must go in suspense?”
“Drumsticks! Here, Nip!” The dog was in her lap in a twinkling. She pulled off her driving-glove and thrust her fingers into its mouth. “Bite, Nip, bite.”
Will felt his first conscious flash of romance in all that fagging chase. It was like dying together.
But Nip’s teeth refused to close on his mistress’s fingers—instead he growled ominously at Will.
“Bite, you naughty dog!” And she pressed his reluctant teeth together.
“There!” She held down towards Will two fingers faintly ridged in red and white. But instead of feeling a reassuring sanity, an impulse he felt really mad streamed through his veins to seize the little fingers in his strong hands and to pull her down from the seat of the mighty, down towards the inner breast pocket that held his bank-notes. But his stick and his coat and Methusalem’s bridle, all of which he was holding simultaneously, cluttered up his hands sufficiently to clog the impulse.
“That proves nothing,” he said sulkily.