"While you were in Holloway, sir, and all through the Trial...."
The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been left open. He vanished through it with harlequin-like agility as a terrible, white-faced black figure seemed to leap upon him....
"I've 'ad an escape for my life!" he said, having reached in a series of bounds the safer regions below stairs.
"Of the Doctor?... Go on with your rubbishing nonsense!" said the cook.
"What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear?" demanded the housemaid, who was more imaginative, and cherished the buddings of a romantic passion for one who should be for ever nameless:
"Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by—that's what she've done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his dewy brow. "And seeing the Doctor for the first time since I've been in his service a bit overtook with liquor, and more free and easy like than customary—being a gentleman you or me would 'esitate to take a liberty with in the ordinary way o' things—I thought I'd let 'im know about the Goings On."
"Of them two...." interpolated the cook—"Her and the Captain?"
"Shameless, I call 'em!" exclaimed the incandescent housemaid as Tait signified assent.
"'Aven't they kep' it dark, though!" wondered the cook.
"They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite got over the desertion of the young woman he was to have married, and who had gone off with somebody else, "a precious downy couple. And what I say is—it's a Riddance!"