ell-rope. A groan answered me: and there in the doorway stood, or
rather titubated, my paragon of body-servants. He was collarless,
unkempt; his face a tinted map of shame and bodily disorder. His hand
shook on the hot-water can, and spilled its contents into his shoes. I
opened on him with a tirade, but had no heart to continue. The fault,
after all, was mine: and it argued something like heroism in the lad
that he had fought his nausea down and come up to time.

"But not smiling," I assured him.

"O, please, Mr. Anne. Go on, sir; I deserve it. But I'll never do it
again, strike me sky-blue scarlet!"

"In so far as that differed from your present colouring, I believe,"
said I, "it would be an improvement."

"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 was 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.

"'Well,' 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 to the herring. "It's
all ye'll get, Mr.--Ducie, if that's your name."

"Madam"--I held out the fish at the end of my fork--"you drag it across
the track of an apology." I set it back on the dish and replaced the
cover. "It is clear that you wi