"My dear Mr. Rodney——"
"Instant destruction," he repeated, with a slight sforzando, "owing to the temper of the owner, Mr. Lite, the Bun Emperor."
"The Bun Emperor!"
"He is universally named so by the children of the British Isles, for whom he—caters, I think they call it."
"Dear me! how many words there are in the dictionary that one never hears in society."
"Mercifully—most mercifully! Mr. Lite is a man of very peculiar proclivities. I have made a minute study of them in order to carry out your instructions successfully."
"It is most good and industrious of you."
"Oh, I shrink from nothing in such a cause. He is, I must tell you, a man of violent temper and enormous means, devoted to home life, and extremely suspicious of strangers."
"What a terrible combination of idiosyncrasies!"
"Precisely. My difficulty was to dislodge a man of such a character from his 'temple of domesticity,' as he calls it, even for one week. There were, I confess it, moments in which despair seized me, and I could have cried aloud, like an Eastern pilgrim, 'Allah has turned his face from me!'"