“Oh! Well, I’ve got to go and wash the dishes,” she said. “Goo’ mornin’.”
§ 2
Hash Todhunter was not a swift-thinking man. Nor was he one of those practised amateurs of the sex who can read volumes in a woman’s glance and see in a flash exactly what she means when she scrapes arabesques on a gravel path with the toe of her shoe. For some three hours and more, therefore, he remained in a state of perfect content. And then suddenly, while smoking a placid after-luncheon pipe, his mood changed and there began to seep into the hinterlands of his mind the idea that in Claire’s manner at their recent meeting there had been something decidedly peculiar.
He brooded over this; and as the lunch which he had cooked and eaten fought what was for the moment a winning battle with his organs of digestion, there crept over him a sombre alarm. Slowly, but with a persistence not to be denied, the jealousy of which sleep had cured him began to return. He blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke and through it stared bleakly at Chimp Twist, who was in a reverie on the other side of the kitchen table.
It came to him, not for the first time, that he did not like Chimp’s looks. Handsome not even his mother could have called Chimp Twist; and yet there was about him a certain something calculated to inspire uneasiness in an engaged man. He had that expression in his eyes which home wreckers wear in the movies. A human snake, if ever there was one, felt Hash, as his interior mechanism strove vainly to overcome that which he had thrust upon it.
Nor did his recollection of Claire’s conversation bring any reassurance. So brief it had been that he could remember everything she had said. And it had all been about that black-hearted little object across the table.
“How’s Mr. Twist this morning?” A significant question. “Not been quarrelling with him, have you?” A fishy remark. And then he had said that they had been having a chat, and she had asked, “About me?”
So moved was Hash by the recollection of this that he took the pipe out of his mouth and addressed his companion with an abruptness that was almost violent:
“Hey!”
Chimp looked up with a start. He had been pondering whether it might not possibly come within the scope of an odd-job man’s duties to put a ladder against the back of the house and climb up it and slap a coat of paint on the window frame of the top back room. Then, when Hash was cooking dinner——