It rose again, however, and yet again, impossible apparently quite to submerge. On the third evening it came up suddenly, emerging from silence in a fresh dress.
“It would be difficult to find a worse way for disposing of money,” Camilla said, her rather grating voice breaking on the absolute stillness of her surroundings—Jock never snored and Edward never cleared his throat—“but I suppose we must give her a trousseau.”
“It would be like you,” he answered, carefully dissociating himself, as he invariably did, from any share in her generosities.
She must have grown too much used to this habit of fifteen years to be annoyed by it; so perhaps it was some warmth in his acquiescence that ruffled her, or simply that her stock of amiability had run low, but her rejoinder was certainly not amiable.
“She shall have no voice in the choice of it.”
Ten minutes more must have elapsed before Jock pricked his ears, the finer dog-sense out-running human hearing. Camilla looked with wondering tenderness at him over the pins on which her philanthropic sweater was growing into fleecy life.
“What does he think he hears?”
Edward shook his head, and Jock jumped out of his basket and made for the door, which opened as he reached it to admit a figure racing in at the top of its speed.
Before the astounded couple realized its presence, the figure whose flexibility of knee-joint had often been a trial to its female patron had flung itself in an attitude of prayer between them.
“I have come back to you! Do not drive me away!”