Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/257



OU dear!" I thought. But I only said, "How sweet of you!" in a nice, ladylike tone. And while he pumped the wettest and coldest water I ever felt, he drily advised me to call him "Adversity" if I found his "uses sweet," since he wasn't to be Jack for me. What if he had known that I always call him "Jack" to myself?

He not only pumped the kettle full, but carried it into the kitchen, and bullied or flattered the goddesses there until they gave him the hottest place for it on the red-hot stove. Meanwhile, as my eyes accustomed themselves to darkness after light, I spied in the courtyard of the pump a shed piled with wood; and my uncomfortably prophetic soul said that if Lady Turnour were to have a fire, the woodpile and I must do the trick together. Souls can be mistaken though, sometimes, if consciences never can; and Brother Adversity contradicted mine by darting out again to see what I was doing, ordering me to stop, and doing it all himself.

I ran to beg for immediate bed-linen while he annexed a portion of the family woodpile, and we met outside my mistress's door. On the threshold I confidently expected her grateful ladyship to say: "What are you doing with that wood, Dane?" But she was too much crushed under her own load of cold and discomfort to object to Rh