“You are right,” she said quickly. “Were I compelled to make choice between them, I should infinitely prefer the butcher!”
“‘The butcher!’” Bertham’s face of utter consternation mingled with incredulity drew her laugh from her. And it was so round and sweet and mellow that the crystal lusters of the Sèvres and ormolu candlesticks upon the mantel-shelf rang a little tinkling echo when it had stopped.
“The butcher who supplies us here,” she explained.
Bertham said, speaking between his teeth and with the knuckles showing white in the strong slender hand he clenched and shook at an imaginary vendor of chops and sirloins:
“What consummate and confounded insolence!”
“No, no!” she cried, for his tall, slight, athletic figure was striding up and down the little parlor, and the fierce grind of his heel each time he turned within the limit of the hearthrug threatened the cat’s repose. “You shall not fume, and say hard things of him! He knows nothing of me except that I am the matron here. And he thinks that I should be better off in the sitting-room behind his shop in Oxford Street, keeping his books of accounts and ‘ordering any nice little delicate joint’ I ‘happened to fancy for dinner....’ And possibly I should be better off, from his point of view?”
Bertham’s heel came sharply down upon the hearthrug. The outraged cat rent the air with a feline squall, and sought refuge under the sofa.
“Come out, Mr. Bright!” coaxed his mistress, kneeling by the injured one’s retreat. “He is very sorry! He didn’t mean it! He will never do it again!” She added, rising, with Mr. Bright, already soothed and purring, in her arms, “And he is going away now, regretful as we are to have to send him. For it is my night on duty, Robert, and I must rest.”
“You will always send me away,” said he, “when you choose. And I shall always come back again, until you show me that I am not wanted.”
“That will be never, dear friend!”