"It's awfully good of you, Mrs. Hill," he said, the worried creases in his long face relaxing. "Every time I get up a village concert I swear it will be the last, but I go on doing it year by year. You have no idea what the tribulations are——"
"That is meant for me," said the Duchess, lowering her voice to a guilty whisper. "—I ask you, how could I help it? You know what a commotion there was this morning, getting off to the meet.—I told somebody to call down from my window to Rufus Brown that he was to attend this concert and sing John Peel.—I could tell him a mile off by his old grey horse; you know how the creature bobs his head up and down:——"
"I did your bidding," said Barnaby. "You only said 'Stop him!' and I don't know who on earth it was, but it certainly wasn't Rufus."
"How was I to know," groaned the Duchess, "that he had sold the grey?"
"But the beggar was quite delighted," protested Barnaby, who saw nothing worse than a joke in this substitution of a probably voiceless stranger. "He undertook to do it."
The Duchess pointed a solemn finger.
"Barnaby," she said, "you have been out of the world too long. You don't know the whole horror of the position. There he sits!"
"Flushed with victory," murmured someone else, "hoarse with bawling:——"
"It was an awful moment," said the Duchess, "when he came and thanked me for the compliment I had paid him. I've never spoken to the wretch in my life."
"He feels you have adopted him now," said the Job's comforter at her elbow. "Barnaby, you don't know him. He's the most impossible bounder who was ever kicked out of society, and we have all been turning him the cold shoulder for the last two seasons. We were beginning to hope we had finally choked him off."