But K.K. refused to "come on." She was furiously jealous of the unaristocratic little mongrel who had suddenly invaded her precincts. She took refuge in a hurt dignity; she turned her head away at his approach with an unmistakable suggestion. The puppy was not hurt; he had, together with his dirt and his plebeian origin, a useful thick-skinned philosophy.
K.K. retired to a corner, back to audience, and Nell tried to sketch the puppy. When held by Molly, he howled so pathetically that he procured his release, which was exactly what he meant to do. Thereupon he licked all available hands and waddled back to Kate Kearney. As interludes to his worrying of her, he tugged a great hole into the table-cloth and upset Nell's paint-water; he managed to get a pencil stuck into his mouth, and screamed with terror; he, perhaps, after all, and in spite of his plebeian philosophy, somewhat affected by K.K.'s suggestively averted nose, essayed a bath in her drinking-pan. He upset the pan, and his own feelings; dripping and whimpering at the shock of the water, he ran round the room, and chose a wet oil-painting of Nell's against which to dry himself. The result was bad for the painting, and for the puppy, too. Adorned with patches of green and blue, he waxed pathetic, sat down with a disconcerting suddenness, and put his head on one side.
Nell exclaimed, "I can't give him back like that!" and had resort to turpentine.
All the puppy's instincts arose and defied her. He wriggled and kicked and howled, and in the midst of it Sheila Pat appeared with Jim on her arm, and the information that Aunt Kezia had returned home. The puppy was released. The Atom put Jim down, and ran to him delightedly. But a change had come o'er the puppy. On the floor Jim O'Driscoll sat, lazily picking the shell from a nut. He took no notice of the puppy; his air of complete indifference was positively insulting. The puppy stood for a minute, petrified, then he pranced a little closer, and waited. Jim scratched his left ear and ruminated. The puppy barked. Jim scratched his right ear and ruminated further. The puppy made a nervous dash at him, and fled with his tail between his legs. Jim drew in the foot that the puppy had touched and went on shelling his nut. There was a pause, then the puppy approached within a yard of the blasé little figure on the floor and barked. They tried to stop him, but that puppy refused to be stopped; he had a good deal to say, and he meant to say it. That the object of the rude things he was saying gave not the slightest heed to him merely aggravated his eloquence to a louder pitch.
Molly thrust her head round the door. "Aunt Kezia is coming!"
Nell seized the puppy and poked him into the bottom shelf of the cupboard. Sheila Pat dropped Jim's cage behind the sofa, picked Jim up, poked him into it, tried to fasten the door, and Miss Kezia entered the room. There was a dead silence while she gazed about and took in every detail of disorder down to a dropped match.
"Ow—yow—yow—yo—o—ow!"
A long and distressful wail arose from the cupboard.
Now it happened that Kate Kearney had so far foregone her dignity as to approach the cupboard to dab at it with a triumphant and insulting paw.
"There it is again!" Miss Kezia was wrathful, but there was also an anxious glint in her eye. "What is the matter with the dog? Is it ill?"