“No, it won’t,” jokingly rejoined the baronet. “With three dozen, some of us will have to be contented with eleven.”
“How so, Sir Robert?”
“You forget the oyster that is to go to your eye. And now I look more carefully at that adolescent mouse, I think it will require at least a couple of the bivalves to give it a proper covering.”
Swinton laughed at the baronet’s ready wit. How could he help it?
“Well, let them be baker’s dozen,” he said. “That will cover everything.” Three baker’s dozen were ordered and brought Fan saw to them being stewed in the kitchen, and placed with appropriate “trimmings” on the table; while the biggest of them, spread upon a white rag, was laid against her husband’s eye, and there snugly bandaged.
It blinded that one eye. Stingy as he was, Sir Robert would have given a sovereign had it shut the sight out of both!
But it did not; and the three sate down to supper, his host keeping the sound eye upon him.
And so carefully was it kept upon him, that the baronet felt bored with the situation, and wished himself back at his club.
He thought of making some excuse to escape from it; and then of staying, and trying to make the best of it. An idea occurred to him.
“This brute sometimes gets drunk,” was his mental soliloquy, as he looked across the table at his host with the Cyclopean eye. “If I can make him so, there might be a chance of getting a word with her. I wonder whether it can be done? It can’t cost much to try. Half a dozen of champagne ought to do it.”