“You brute! I hate you!”
“Oh, I say,” gasped Robert. “It’s not my fault, Marion. I don’t know what it is. Honestly I didn’t do it——”
Some of the solution had found its way into Robert’s mouth and he was trying to eject it as politely as possible.
“It came from your beastly house,” said Marion angrily. “And it’s ruined my hat and I hate you and I’ll never speak to you again.”
She turned on her heel and walked off, mopping the back of her neck with a handkerchief as she went.
Robert stared at her unrelenting back till she was out of sight, then went indoors. Ruined her hat indeed? What was a hat, anyway? It had ruined his suit—simply ruined it. And how had the old cat got his bag he’d like to know. He wouldn’t mind betting a quid that that little wretch William had had something to do with it. He always had.
He decided not to commit suicide after all. He decided to live for years and years and years to make the little wretch’s life a misery to him—if he could!
CHAPTER VIII
WILLIAM THE MATCH-MAKER
William was feeling disillusioned. He had received, as a birthday present, a book entitled “Engineering Explained to Boys,” and had read it in bed at midnight by the light of a lamp which he had “borrowed” from his elder brother’s photographic apparatus for the purpose. The book had convinced William that it would be perfectly simple with the aid of a little machinery, to turn a wooden packing case into a motor boat. He spent two days on the work. He took all the elastic that he could find in his mother’s work drawer. He disembowelled all the clockwork toys that he possessed. To supplement this he added part of the works of the morning-room clock. He completely soaked himself and his clothes in oil. Finally the thing was finished and William, stern and scowling and tousled and oily, deposited the motor boat on the edge of the pond, stepped into it and pushed off boldly. It shot into the middle of the pond and promptly sank.... So did William. He returned home wet and muddy and oily and embittered, to meet a father who, with a grown-up’s lack of sense of proportion, was waxing almost lyrical over the disappearance of the entrails of the morning-room clock.