Page:The Yellow Book - 02.djvu/59

Rh "You should get married, my dear, without delay. Pierre would be ready enough, no doubt?"—"Bah! Pierre or annuder—if I brought a weddin' portion. You don't tink to provide me wid one, I s'pose?"—"You know that I can't. But why don't you get it from the Tourtels? You've earned it before this, I dare swear."

It was now that the housekeeper came up, and took down to Louisa Poidevin the message given above. But first she was detained by Owen, to assist him in getting his patient into bed.

The old man woke up during the process, very peevish, very determined to get to town. "Well, you can't go till to-morrow den," said Mrs. Tourtel; "your cousin has gone home, an' now you've got to go to sleep, so be quiet." She dropped all semblance of respect in her tones. "Come, lie down!" she said sharply, "or I'll send Margot to tickle your feet." He shivered and whimpered into silence beneath the clothes.

"Margot tells him 'bout witches, an' ogres, an' scrapels her fingures long de wall, till he tinks dere goin' to fly 'way wid him," she explained to Owen in an aside. "Oh, I know Margot," he answered laconically, and thought, "May I never lie helpless within reach of such fingers as hers."

He took a step and stumbled over a portmanteau lying open at his feet. "Put your mischievous paws to some use," he told the girl, "and clear these things away from the floor;" then remembering his rival Le Lievre; "if the old fool had really got away to town, it would have been a nice day's work for us all," he added.

Downstairs he joined the Tourtels in the kitchen, a room situated behind the living-room on the left, with low green glass windows, rafters and woodwork smoke-browned with the fires of a dozen generations. In the wooden racks over by the chimney The Yellow Book—Vol. II