Bessie could eat neither fish nor kidneys, that morning. "Mama, there was some game-pie left, last night. Mayn't I have some of it?"
The servant was rung for to bring the game-pie. "If there are any oyster patties we might have them in, mother," Bernard suggested.
The mother, sadly gazing, assented. Nothing would she have denied them, that morning—her poor children who were so soon to be deprived of game-pies and oysters for ever!
They were in the midst of breakfast, their voices a little subdued because mama was not well, yet with an enjoyable sense of freedom because papa, who was so often irritable at that meal, had not yet come down, when suddenly the door opened and without any announcement Mr. George Boult walked in.
He was a man they all knew as a friend and associate of the master of the house, but he had never been held in favour by its mistress nor her children, who indeed had but the slightest acquaintance with him. He had been a school-fellow of William Day's at the Brockenham Grammar School; a kind of comradeship had existed between the two from that time till now. George Boult had assumed for years the habit of dropping in at Queen Anne Street on Sunday afternoons to smoke a cigar and drink a glass of wine with the lawyer, but it was a function the men had enjoyed tête-à-tête: as an intimate in the family circle he had not been admitted.
Boult could have bought up all the superior people who turned up their noses at him, his friend frequently declared; it had been a standing grievance of his against his wife that she declined to put Mr. Boult's name on the list of people invited to her parties.
George Boult was a self-made man; the process of manufacture recent, and unfortunately fresh in people's minds. "If I invite the man who keeps the draper's shop the professional people won't come to meet him," Mrs. Day pointed out, and remained obdurate on the point. But because he, who did not in the least wish to go to her parties, could not be invited to them, a little awkwardness in the relations of her husband's Sunday afternoon visitor and Mrs. Day had arisen.
His appearance thus early in the morning, and in the midst of their meal was a matter more than a little surprising to them all. He was a short, rather podgy man, with fair whiskers curled upon red cheeks, a common, up-turned, broad-nostrilled nose, a wide, thick-lipped mouth; quick, observant, but by no means beautiful eyes, a protruding chin, and a roll of flesh which showed above his collar at the back of his neck. Well and carefully he was dressed, however, and wore that air of conscious prosperity to be observed in the man who has carved his own fortunes and is proud of the fact.
He grasped, in his broad, short-fingered, red one, the white hand of Mrs. Day, who went forward to meet him. "I got a verbal message from your husband last night, asking me to look you up the first thing this morning," he said. "This is a sad business for you all; I am sorry—very sorry."
Mrs. Day took her place behind her tea-cups again, lacking the strength to stand.