"Any dinner for a hungry wayfarer?"
Gordon Thompson, furious at the marriage, had missed many mid-day meals; but now he came to pick up the severed thread of kindness. However, he was not confident; his whistle had been feeble, tentative, and the ascending note of his voice quavered. In order to propitiate, he had brought from Linkfield a market-gardener's basket with celery and winter cabbages. The present would surely make them glad to see him.
"What do you want here? No orders are given at the door. We buy our vegetables at Rogers's in High Street. Don't come cadging here. Get out."
Marsden wickedly pretended to mistake him for an itinerant greengrocer.
"Mayn't I go up?... Is it to be cuts? Am I not to call on my cousin?"
"Who's your cousin, I'd like to know."
"Jen-ny Thompson."
"No one of that name lives here."
"Jen-ny Marsden then. I say—it's all right. You're him, I suppose. Well, I'm Gordon Thompson—your wife's cousin."
"My wife never had a cousin of that name. Before she married me, she married a man called Thompson—though she didn't marry all his humbugging beggarly relations."