And she slipped away, carrying with her an atmosphere of curious cultivation.
"That man is very offensive, very!" said Mr. Rodney with feeling.
"For being thrown out of the hammock?"
"He had no business to be in it. Servants should not go about sleeping all over the place in their masters' gardens. This sort of thing is never permitted at Mitching Dean."
"Oh, I like to see the humble enjoying themselves," said Mrs. Verulam with vague beneficence, a little forgetful, perhaps, of Mr. Harrison's natural self-importance and late severe accident. "But what were you going to say to me?"
And she sat down on a rustic seat made from the trunk of a tree all knobs. Mr. Rodney perched in a distressed manner upon one of the branches, and said dolefully:
"Really, all this—this tumult has quite put it out of my head."
"You wished, I think, to tell me the truth about something," said Mrs. Verulam in an assisting voice.
"I believe so—yes, I thought it my duty," began Mr. Rodney.
He was now in cold blood, owing to the late hammock episode, and found it difficult to say what would have been easy enough when he was in what was for him a passion. He ran one long hand over a dozen or so of the knobs, feeling them like a phrenologist.