Mrs. Todhetley put her hand on my arm. “Johnny, what is it? Where is the danger?”
“There’s no danger at all,” struck in Tod. “I suppose I can burn some old fishing-tackle rubbish in my basin if I please—horsehair, and that. You should not have the grates filled with paper, ma’am, if you don’t like the smell.”
She went to the basin, found the smell did come from it, and then looked at us both. I was smiling, and it reassured her.
“You might have taken it to the kitchen and burnt it there, Joseph,” she said mildly. “Indeed, I was very much alarmed.”
“Thanks to Hannah,” said Tod. “You’d have known nothing about it but for her. I wish you’d just order her to mind her own business.”
“It was my business, Mr. Joseph—smelling all that frightful smell of singeing! And if—— Why, whose boots are these?” broke off Hannah.
Opening the closet to get out the hair, we had left Fred’s boots exposed. Hannah’s eyes, ranging themselves round in search of the singeing, had espied them. She answered her own question.
“You must have brought them from school in your box by mistake. Mr. Joseph. These are men’s boots, these are!”
“I can take them back to school again,” said Tod, carelessly.
So that passed off. “And it is the best thing we can do with the boots, Johnny, as I think,” he said to me in a low tone when we were once more left to ourselves. “We can’t burn them. They’d make a choicer scent than the hair made.”