“I never ordered this.”
“Hadn’t you better open it?” she asked with a twinkle. He dumped down the cages violently, to the alarm of the ferrets, and tore it open, only to shudder back before the clammy-looking coils.
“An adder as well?” said Jinny. “You going to open a menagerie?”
“It’s dead,” he said.
“Did you want a live one?”
“I didn’t want one at all—I never ordered it.”
“Why, Uncle Lilliwhyte told me he sold it to you for fourpence and you gave him twopence extra to kill it.”
“I beg your pardon—he misunderstood.” It was his second apology. “But what a dirty way to deliver it.”
“Did you expect me to nurse a viper in my bosom?”
Again this indelicate speech, hardly atoned for by its wit. “The old ragamuffin!” he muttered furiously. “How did the idiot know it was me?”