Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/29



“, m'lud,” replied Tomps, the butler, with a certain quaking complacency.

“I know it's a bit rough,” continued the old Earl of Dealle out of the depths of his armchair whose upholstery had seen better days. He leaned forward a little and lowered his, voice. His keen, wrinkled, rather wicked old face was in strange contrast with his homespun Saxon name: the lips thin, the cheek bones high, the. nose hawkish, exaggerated, and with flaring, nervous nostrils, the eyes beady and black, and the complexion suffused with, a golden-brown tinge.

“Rather rougher on you than on me,” he went on. “For I have only to eat with the creature while you have to wait on him, what? But—well—the creature has money, frightful, vulgar heaps of money, and my agent writes me he's willing to plop down a stiffish lot of the ready for the proper sort o' country estate, with ancestral portraits and ancestral defective plumbing and ancestral family spook all complete.”

“I understand, m'lud.”

“You jolly well ought to, Tomps. For if the creature rents Dealle Castle, there's a corkin' chance that I'll pay you the two years' wages I owe you.”

“Thank you, m'lud.”