Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/350



CHOES of the Monday night dinner reached me the following day. The affair had passed off pleasantly enough, the members of the Bohemian set conducting themselves quite as persons who mattered, with the exception of the Klondike woman herself, who, I gathered, had descended to a mood of most indecorous liveliness considering who the guest of honour was. She had not only played and sung those noisy native folksongs of hers, but she had, it seemed, conducted herself with a certain facetious familiarity toward his lordship.

"Every now and then," said Cousin Egbert, my principal informant, "she'd whirl in and josh the Cap all over the place about them funny whiskers he wears. She told him out and out he'd just got to lose them."

"Shocking rudeness!" I exclaimed.

"Oh, sure, sure!" he agreed, yet without indignation. "And the Cap just hated her for it—you could tell that by the way he looked at her. Oh, he hates her something terrible. He just can't bear the sight of her."

"Naturally enough," I observed, though there had been an undercurrent to his speech that I thought almost quite a little odd. His accents were queerly placed. Had I not known him too well I should have thought him trying to be deep. I recalled his other phrases, that Mrs. Effie was seeing which way a cat would leap, and that the Klondike 336