Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/289

Rh husband would come and read the paper to him as usual in the morning. The Squire had a blatant voice, and thought it necessary to read with a great deal of expression, and always mistook the novelist's affliction for deafness.

"I shall be delighted," said Allan in a spiritless voice.

But after all it was not the Squire who came to read the Times to him on the following morning. It was the unknown lady of the night before; and she knocked at his door just as the housekeeper was clearing away the breakfast.

"The Squire has a cold," she explained, with the faintest suggestion of laughter in her voice, "and I said I would come instead. It is so unpleasant to read to any one if you've got a cold, isn't it? It makes so many interruptions."

"It is very unpleasant to be read to by the Squire when the Squire has got a cold," said Allan, boldly. Somehow the reading did not promise to be quite as dull as usual. "Where shall I begin?" she said, disregarding his remark altogether; "I read atrociously, you know, but I hope you won't mind that."

"How do you expect me to believe it?" he said, and suggested that she should begin with the Foreign News.

She had not under-estimated her powers. She had all the tricks of which a bad reader is capable. She made two or three attempts at every word that baffled her, and said, "Oh, bother!" at the end of each. She forgot to read out any of the explanatory headings, and she rushed through the politics on the Continent as though they all related to one nation whose name she had not mentioned. She frequently read a few lines to herself and then continued aloud further on, while her listener had to supply the context for himself.

"That's the end of the Foreign News," she said presently, to