Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/360

 "Never again, Mr. Anne."

"Certainly not, Rowley. Even to good men this may happen once: beyond that, carelessness shades off into depravity." "Yessir." "You gave a good deal of trouble last night. I have yet to meet Mrs. McRankine."

"As for that, Mr. Anne," said he, with an incongruous twinkle in his bloodshot eye, "she've been up with a tray: dry toast and a pot of tea. The old gal's bark is worse than her bite, sir, begging your pardon, and meaning as she's a decent one, she is."

"I was fearing that might be just the trouble," I answered.

One thing is certain. Rowley, that morning, should not be entrusted with a razor and the handling of my chin. I sent him back to his bed, with orders not to rise from it without permission; and went about my toilette deliberately. In spite of the lad, I did not enjoy the prospect of Mrs. McRankine.

I enjoyed it so little, indeed, that I fell to poking the sitting-room fire when she entered with the Mercury; and read the Mercury assiduously while she brought in breakfast. She set down the tray with a slam and stood beside it, her hands on her hips, her whole attitude breathing challenge.

"Well, Mrs. McRankine?" I began, upturning a hypocritical eye from the newspaper.

"'W'ell,' is it? Nhm!"

I lifted the breakfast cover, and saw before me a damnatory red herring.

"Rowley was very foolish last night," I remarked, with a discriminating stress on the name.

"'The ass knoweth his master's crib.'" She pointed