Page:Herbert Jenkins - Patricia Brent Spinster.djvu/208

 guests to have their own drinks. Mr. Cordal, for instance, drank what the label on the bottle announced to be "Gumton's Superior Light Dinner Ale." Mrs. Mosscrop-Smythe favoured Guinness's Stout, Miss Sikkum took hot water, whilst Miss Wangle satisfied herself with a claret bottle. There is refinement in claret, the dear bishop always drank it, with water: but as claret costs money Miss Wangle made a bottle last for months.

The thought of the usual heterogeneous collection of bottles on the occasion of Lord Peter's visit had filled Mrs. Craske-Morton with horror, and she had decided to "spring" wine, as Mr. Bolton put it. In other words, she supplied for the whole company four bottles of one-and-eightpenny claret, the bottles rendered beautifully old by applied dust and cobwebs. To this she had added a bottle of grocer's champagne for Bowen. Gustave had been elaborately instructed that this was for the principal guest and the principal guest only, and Mrs. Craske-Morton had managed to convey to him in some subtle way that if he poured so much as a drop of the precious fluid into any other person's glass, the consequences would be too terrifying even to contemplate.

Whilst Galvin House was murmuring softly over its soup, Gustave approached Bowen with the champagne bottle swathed in a white napkin, and looking suspiciously like an infant in long clothes. Holding the end of the bottle's robes with the left