But the mischief was done. The alert eye of an ambitious police constable had traveled from the open basket at one side of the fire to the object at the other, sleeping gently now upon Eliza’s knee. A slow grin crept over a freckled but vulpine countenance.
“Blame my cats,” he muttered, “so there’s the young spannil.”
Joe rose majestically. He said not a word, but again taking the intruder very firmly by the collar of his regulation overcoat, hustled him with quiet truculence through the open door into the street. Closing the door and turning the key, he then went back to his meditations, looking more than ever like a disgruntled bear.
CHAPTER II
AUNT ANNIE AND AUNTY HARRIET
I
Aunt Annie was the first to be told the great news. In the view of both nieces it was in the natural order of things that this august lady should take precedence of the rest of the world. She was so incontestably the family “personage,” the eminence she occupied was such a dizzy one, that it would have been just as unthinkable not to grant her priority in a matter of such vital importance, as it would have been to deny it to Queen Victoria in an affair of State.
In point of fact, Aunt Annie, within her own orbit, was the counterpart and reflection of her Sovereign. In an outlook they were alike, they were alike in the range of their ideas, and well-informed people had said that they had tricks of speech and manner in common. This may have been a little in excess of the truth, one of those genial pleasantries it is the part of wisdom to accept in the spirit in which they are offered, but it would be wrong to deny that in the suburb of Laxton Aunt Annie took rank as a very great lady.
It is true that she lived in a small and modest house in an unpretentious street, but all the world knew that the flower of her years had been passed in abodes very different. And not only that, it was also known that every year on her birthday, the twenty-sixth of March, those whom it is hardly right to mention in these humble pages came to call on her. On the twenty-sixth of every March, sometime in the afternoon, a remarkable equipage would appear before the chaste precincts of “Bowley,” Croxton Park Road. At that hour every self-respecting pair of eyes in the immediate neighborhood would be ambushed discreetly behind curtains in order to watch the descent of a real live princess with a neat parcel.
The contents of the parcel were said to vary from year to year. Now it would be a piece of choice needlework, fashioned by the accomplished hands of Royalty itself, which would take the shape of a cushion or a footstool, now a framed photograph of Prince Adolphus or Princess Geraldine in significant stages of their adolescence, now a chart of the august features of even more important members of the family. Many were the historical objects disposed about Aunt Annie’s sitting-room, which the elect of the neighborhood had the privilege of seeing and handling when they came to call upon her. But when all was said, the undoubted gem of the collection was a superb edition, bound in full calf, of the Poems of A. L. O. E., with a certain signature upon the fly-leaf. This was always kept under glass.
It chanced that Aunt Annie had invited herself to tea at Number Five, Beaconsfield Villas, the day after the arrival of the babe. This was strictly in accord with rule and precedent. She was far too much a personage to be invited by her niece Eliza, but if she intimated by a letter, which was the last word in precision, that she proposed to call on a certain day, Eliza humbly and gratefully overhauled the best tea service and polished the lacquer tray which was only used on State occasions.