“All right,” responded Flurry; “and when you do, don’t forget to tell her how you flogged the colt out on to the road over her own bound’s ditch.”
“Very well,” I said, hotly, “I may as well go home and send in my papers. They’ll break me over this—”
“Ah, hold on, Major,” said Flurry, soothingly, “it’ll be all right. No one knows anything. It’s only on spec’ the old lady sent the Bobbies here. If you’ll keep quiet it’ll all blow over.”
“I don’t care,” I said, struggling hopelessly in the toils; “if I meet your grandmother, and she asks me about it, I shall tell her all I know.”
“Please God you’ll not meet her! After all, it’s not once in a blue moon that she——” began Flurry. Even as he said the words his face changed. “Holy fly!” he ejaculated, “isn’t that her dog coming into the field? Look at her bonnet over the wall! Hide, hide, for your life!” He caught me by the shoulder and shoved me down among the furze bushes before I realised what had happened.
“Get in there! I’ll talk to her.”
I may as well confess that at the mere sight of Mrs. Knox’s purple bonnet my heart had turned to water. In that moment I knew what it would be like to tell her how I, having eaten her salmon, and capped her quotations, and drunk her best port, had gone forth and helped to steal her horse. I abandoned my dignity, my sense of honour; I took the furze prickles to my breast and wallowed in them.
Mrs. Knox had advanced with vengeful speed; already she was in high altercation with Flurry at no great distance from where I lay; varying sounds of battle reached me, and I gathered that Flurry was not—to put it mildly—shrinking from that economy of truth that the situation required.