"Late again, Samuel!" she remarked, with a freezing spectacle-gleam that fixed me to the stair-carpet—my right foot two steps above the left. "You have just come in, I suppose. Have you seen Beauty?"
Horror! Could she suspect anything? I felt my face growing the colour of my hair, and my tongue frozen solid.
"Can't you answer?" she went on wrathfully. "And can't you stand up straight?"
I pulled my legs together and commenced to stammer.
"I—I saw Beauty out—outside, aunt, in the garden," I managed to mutter.
"Which way was he going?"
"Why, I think he was running towards the house, aunt."
And then the remembrance of how he was running—thirty miles an hour, with tail on end and ears flat to his head, with Jim and my long-legged self racing in rear—made me choke with laughter I was forced to swallow. But my aunt's eyes were on me, and her gold-rimmed barnacles blazed through me, so I suffocated in silence.
"Don't stand making faces like an idiot. Go and dress, and be quick," snapped my loving relative, as she marched away downstairs and I flew to the region above.