“All right,” said Mr. Bonstone briskly. “We’ll go on the supposition that the offender is unknown.”
The ladies were at breakfast when we entered, and very sweet and pretty they looked, as they sat at a well-spread table, drawn up close to some windows overlooking the rose-garden.
My dear mistress had got a little more flesh, and I thought her quite handsome now, but she never ceased inwardly bemoaning the fact that her beauty had fled, though she said little about it.
“Let it stay fled,” Gringo often growled. “She’s a better woman without it.”
“No, Rudolph, I don’t want to look at drunken hens, or drunken anything,” she said, when my master invited her to go up to the orchard, and see how amusing the hens were. “Suppose George Washington should drink when he grows up,” and she shuddered.
“The drink will all be banished by that time,” said her husband good-naturedly. “You women are getting so decided on the subject.”
“I don’t see how you men can jest,” she went on. “I think it’s a very sad subject—a very sad one,” and she pursed up her lips.
Her husband didn’t answer, but he was pleased with her attitude, for he gave her enough fried chicken for two women, and usually he tried to scrimp her about her food, for he was so afraid of the dreadful flesh coming back.
I think Mr. Bonstone was in misery till breakfast was over. He had put Carty out of his mind, and I knew that there floated continually before his eyes the vision of those white beauties who were no longer mistresses of themselves. He choked once or twice over his coffee, and finally he went off by himself in the rose-garden, and indulged in what Sir Walter calls a burst of Homeric laughter.
“I don’t see why he wants to laugh that way,” Sir Walter often says to me. “It’s so underbred. I like the way Mrs. Bonstone laughs much better.”