"Sure."
"Well, be sure you do it, for there's another Jack-the-Ripper chap goin' about the West End, I've heard, and he may be in on you if you don't."
Having frightened Mrs. Jukes into the sense of the necessity for chains as well as bolts, Mudd put on his hat, blew his nose, and departed, banging the door behind him and making sure it was shut.
There is a flower shop in the street at the end of King Charles Street. He entered, bought his bouquet, and with it in his hand left the establishment. He was looking for a cab to hide himself in; he found none, but he met a fellow butler, Judge Ponsonby's man.
"Hello, Mr. Mudd," said the other; "going courting?"
"Mrs. Jukes asked me to take them to a female friend that's goin' to be married," said Mudd.
The bouquet was not extraordinarily large, but it seemed to grow larger.
Condemned to take an omnibus in lieu of a cab, it seemed to fill the omnibus; people looked at it and then at Mudd. It seemed to him that he was condemned to carry Simon's folly bare in the face of the world. Then he remembered what he had said about the recipient going to be married. Was that an omen?
Mudd believed in omens. If his elbow itched—and it had itched yesterday—he was going to sleep in a strange bed; he never killed spiders, and he tested "strangers" in the tea-cup to see if they were male or female.