“Bill ... Boman! ... it can’t be you?”
“The old identical same,” Mr. William Boman said, with a cheerful smile. “And if the shock has made you giddy, I can turn on the basin-hose in half a tick, and give you a splash of cold as a reviver. Will you have it? No? Then don’t faint, that’s all.”
“You wrote to say you were dying at Dieppe five years ago,” sobbed Petsie, into the folds of the pink calico wrapper. “You wicked, cruel man, you know you did!”
“And now you’re crying because I didn’t die,” said Mr. Boman, arranging his sable forehead-curls in the glass, and complacently twirling a highly-waxed mustache. “No pleasing you women. You never know what you want, strikes me.”
“But somebody sent me a French undertaker’s bill for a first-class funeral, nearly thirty pounds it came to when we’d got the francs down to sovereigns,” moaned Petsie, “and I paid it.”
“That was my little dodge,” said Mr. Boman calmly, “to get a few yellow-birds to go on with. Trouble I’d got into—don’t say any more about it, because I am a reformed character now. And now we’re talking about characters, what price yours, my Lady Rustleton?”
“Oh, Billy!”
“Bigamy ain’t a pretty word, but that’s what it comes to, as I’ve said to myself many an evening as I smoked my cigar on the second-class deck promenade, and heard you singing away in there to the swells in the music-room like a—like a cage full of canaries. I shan’t make no scene nor nothing like that, says I. Her hair’s getting a bit off color—see it by daylight, she’ll have to come my way before long, and then I shall tip her the ghost with a vengeance.”
“Oh, Bill dear, how could you be so cruel!” pleaded Petsie.
“Not so much of the ‘Bill dear,’ I’ll trouble you,” said Mr. Boman sternly. “Why don’t you produce that aristocratic corpse you’ve married, and let me have it out with him? Seasick, is he? I’ll make him land-sick before I’ve done with him, and so I tell you. He’ll have to sell some of his blooming acres to satisfy me, or some of them diamonds of yours, my lady.”