“Liz,” said Mr. Cootes, lost in admiration, “when it comes to doping out a scheme, you’re the snake’s eyebrows!”
“But what are you going to do if he just turns you down?”
Mr. Cootes uttered a bleak laugh, and from the recesses of his costume produced a neat little revolver.
“He won’t turn me down!” he said.
§ 5
“Fancy!” said Miss Peavey. “If I had not had a headache and come back early, we should never have had this little chat!”
She gazed up at Psmith in her gentle, wistful way as they started together down the broad gravel drive. A timid, soulful little thing she looked.
“No,” said Psmith.
It was not a gushing reply, but he was not feeling at his sunniest. The idea that Miss Peavey might return from Bridgeford in advance of the main body had not occurred to him. As he would have said himself, he had confused the Unlikely with the Impossible. And the result had been that she had caught him beyond hope of retreat as he sat in his garden-chair and thought of Eve Halliday, who on their return from the lake had been seized with a fresh spasm of conscience and had gone back to the library to put in another hour’s work before dinner. To decline Miss Peavey’s invitation to accompany her down the drive in order to see if there were any signs of those who had been doing honour to the late Hartley Reddish, M.P., had been out of the question. But Psmith, though he went, went without pleasure. Every moment he spent in her society tended to confirm him more and more in the opinion that Miss Peavey was the curse of the species.
“And I have been so longing,” continued his companion, “to have a nice, long talk. All these days I have felt that I haven’t been able to get as near you as I should wish.”