“Let uncle pretend to be a broker’s man in for the rent,” continued the excitable lady, rapidly. “When Mr. Cox turns up after his spree, tell him what his doings have brought you to, and say you’ll have to go to the workhouse.”
“I look like a broker’s man, don’t I?” said Mr. Piper, in a voice more than tinged with sarcasm.
“Yes,” said his niece, “that’s what put it into my head.”
“It’s very kind of you, dear, and very kind of Mr. Piper,” said Mrs. Cox, “but I couldn’t think of it, I really couldn’t.”
“Uncle would be delighted,” said Mrs. Berry, with a wilful blinking of plain facts. “He’s got nothing better to do; it’s a nice house and good food, and he could sit at the open window and sniff at the sea all day long.”
Mr. Piper sniffed even as she spoke, but not at the sea.
“And I’ll come for him the day after to-morrow,” said Mrs. Berry.
It was the old story of the stronger will: Mrs. Cox after a feeble stand gave way altogether, and Mr. Piper’s objections were demolished before he had given them full utterance. Mrs. Berry went off alone after dinner, secretly glad to have got rid of Mr. Piper, who was making a self-invited stay at her house of indefinite duration; and Mr. Piper, in his new rôle of broker’s man, essayed the part with as much help as a clay pipe and a pint of beer could afford him.
That day and the following he spent amid the faded grandeurs of the drawing-room, gazing longingly at the wide expanse of beach and the tumbling sea beyond. The house was almost uncanily quiet, an occasional tinkle of metal or crash of china from the basement giving the only indication of the industrious Mrs. Cox; but on the day after the quiet of the house was broken by the return of its master, whose annoyance, when he found the drawing-room clock stolen and a man in possession, was alarming in its vehemence. He lectured his wife severely on her mismanagement, and after some hesitation announced his intention of going through her books. Mrs. Cox gave them to him, and, armed with pen and ink and four square inches of pink blotting-paper, he performed feats of balancing which made him a very Blondin of finance.
“I shall have to get something to do,” he said, gloomily, laying down his pen.