'Mr. Runkle ! '
'I'm here.' I8;
'I thought you had gone.'
'I hadn't.'
'How dare you listen to a private conversation ! '
'They're the only things worth listening to. I owe much of my large fortune to listening to private conversations.'
'What is this nonsense about prison?'
'Wooster won't find it nonsense. He has sneaked a valuable silver porringer of mine, a thing I paid nine thousand pounds for, and I am expecting a man any minute now who will produce the evidence necessary to convict. It's an open and shut case.'
'Is this true, Bertie?' said Florence with that touch of the prosecuting District Attorney I remembered so vividly, and all I could say was 'Well... I... er... well'.
With a guardian angel like mine working overtime, it was enough. She delivered judgment instantaneously.
'I shall not marry you,' she said, and went off haughtily to de-egg herself.
'Very sensible of her,' said L. P. Runkle. 'The right course to take. A man like you, bound to be in and out of prison, couldn't possibly be a good husband. How is a wife to make her plans... dinner parties, holidays, Christmas treats for the children, the hundred and one things a woman has to think of, when she doesn't know from one day to another whether the head of the house won't be telephoning to say he's been arrested again and no bail allowed? Yes?' said Runkle, and I saw that Seppings had appeared in the offing.
'A Mr. Bingley has called to see you, sir.'
'Ah, yes, I was expecting him.'
He popped off, and scarcely had he ceased to pollute the atmosphere when the old ancestor blew in. She was plainly agitated, the resemblance to a cat on hot bricks being very marked. She panted a good deal, and her face had taken on the rather pretty mauve colour it always does when the soul is not at rest.
'Bertie,' she boomed, 'When you went away yesterday, did you leave the door of your bedroom unlocked?'
'Of course I didn't.'
'Well, Jeeves says it's open now.'
'It can't be.'
'It is. He thinks Runkle or some minion of his has skeleton-keyed the lock. Don't yell like that, curse you.'
I might have retorted by asking her what she expected me to do when I suddenly saw all, but I was too busy seeing all to be diverted into arguments about my voice production. The awful truth had hit me as squarely between the eyes as if it had been an egg or a turnip hurled by one of the Market Snodsbury electorate.
'Bingley ! ' I ejaculated.
'And don't sing.'
'I was not singing, I was ejaculating 'Bingley ! ', or vociferating 'Bingley ! ' if you prefer it. You remember Bingley, the fellow who stole the club book, the chap you were going to take by the throat and shake like a rat. Aged relative, we are up against it in no uncertain manner. Bingley is the Runkle minion you alluded to. Jeeves says he dropped in to tea this afternoon. What simpler for him, having had his cuppa, than to nip upstairs and search my room? He used to be Runkle's personal attendant, so Runkle would turn to him naturally when he needed an accomplice. Yes, I don't wonder you're perturbed,' I added, for she had set the welkin ringing with one of those pungent monosyllables so often on her lips in the old Quorn-and-Pytchley days. 'And I'll tell you something else which will remove your last doubts, if you had any. He's just turned up again, and Runkle has gone out to confer with him. What do you suppose they're conferring about? Give you three guesses.'
The Quorn trains its daughters well. So does the Pytchley. She did not swoon, as many an aunt would have done in her place, merely repeated the monosyllable in a slightly lower tone,- meditatively as it were, like some aristocrat of the French Revolution on being informed that the tumbril waited.
'This tears it,' she said, the very words such an aristocrat would have used, though speaking of course in French. 'I'll have to confess that I took his foul porringer.'
'No, no, you mustn't do that.'
'What else is there for me to do? I can't let you go to chokey.'
'I don't mind.'
'I do. I may have my faults
' 'No, no.'
'Yes, yes. I am quite aware that there are blemishes in my spiritual make-up which ought to have been corrected at my finishing school, but I draw the line at letting my nephew do a stretch for pinching porringers which I pinched myself. That's final.'
I saw what she meant, of course. Noblesse oblige, and all that. And very creditable, too. But I had a powerful argument to put forward, and I lost no time in putting it.
'But wait, old ancestor. There's another aspect of the matter. If it's... what's the expression?... if it's bruited abroad that I'm merely an as-pure-as-the-driven-snow innocent bystander, my engagement to Florence will be on again.'
'Your what to who?'
