"This is the west drawing-room," said Mrs. Pentreath, calling to the visitors. "The carving of the stone chimney-piece," she added, with the mischievous intention of bringing them into the closest proximity to the steward, "is considered the finest thing in the whole apartment."
Driven from the looking-glass by this manœuvre, Mr. Munder provokingly sauntered to the window and looked out. Sarah, still pale and silent—but with a certain unwonted resolution just gathering, as it were, in the lines about her lips—stopped thoughtfully by the chimney-piece when the housekeeper pointed it out to her. Uncle Joseph, looking all round the room in his discursive manner, spied, in the farthest corner of it from the door that led into the passage, a beautiful maple-wood table and cabinet, of a very peculiar pattern. His workmanlike enthusiasm was instantly aroused, and he darted across the room to examine the make of the cabinet closely. The table beneath projected a little way in front of it, and, of all the objects in the world, what should he see reposing on the flat space of the projection but a magnificent musical box at least three times the size of his own!
"Aïe! Aïe!! Aïe!!!" cried Uncle Joseph, in an ascending scale of admiration, which ended at the very top of his voice. "Open him! set him going! let me hear what he plays!" He stopped for want of words to express his impatience, and drummed with both hands on the lid of the musical box in a burst of uncontrollable enthusiasm.
"Mr. Munder!" exclaimed the housekeeper, hurrying across the room in great indignation. "Why don't you look? why don't you stop him? He's breaking open the musical box. Be quiet, Sir! How dare you touch me?"
"Set him going! set him going!" reiterated Uncle Joseph, dropping Mrs. Pentreath's arm, which he had seized in his agitation. "Look here! this by my side is a music box too! Set him going! Does he play Mozart? He is three times bigger than ever I saw! See! see! this box of mine—this tiny bit of box that looks nothing by the side of yours—it was given to my own brother by the king of all music-composers that ever lived, by the divine Mozart himself. Set the big box going, and you shall hear the little baby-box pipe after! Ah, dear and good madam, if you love me—"
"Sir!!!" exclaimed the housekeeper, reddening with virtuous indignation to the very roots of her hair.
"What do you mean, Sir, by addressing such outrageous language as that to a respectable female?" inquired Mr. Munder, approaching to the rescue. "Do you think we want your foreign noises, and your foreign morals, and your foreign profanity here? Yes, Sir! profanity. Any man who calls any human individual, whether musical or otherwise, 'divine,' is a profane man. Who are you, you extremely audacious person? Are you an infidel?"
Before Uncle Joseph could say a word in vindication of his principles, before Mr. Munder could relieve himself of any more indignation, they were both startled into momentary silence by an exclamation of alarm from the housekeeper.
"Where is she?" cried Mrs. Pentreath, standing in the middle of the drawing-room, and looking with bewildered eyes all around her.
The lady in the quiet dress had vanished.