'The cunning brute,' said Mrs. Peters; 'he took a cream jug because there were so many; he thought one wouldn't be missed. Quick, fly down with it and put it back among the others.'
Wilfrid was late in coming down to breakfast, and his manner showed plainly that something was amiss.
'It's an unpleasant thing to have to say,' he blurted out presently, 'but I'm afraid you must have a thief among your servants. Something's been taken out of my portmanteau. It was a little present from my mother and myself for your silver wedding. I should have given it to you last night after dinner, only it happened to be a cream jug, and you seemed annoyed at having so many duplicates, so I felt rather awkward about giving you another.
I thought I'd get it changed for something else, and now it's gone.'
'Did you say it was from your MOTHER and yourself?' asked Mr. and Mrs. Peter almost in unison. The Snatcher had been an orphan these many years.
'Yes, my mother's at Cairo just now, and she wrote to me at Dresden to try and get you something quaint and pretty in the old silver line, and I pitched on this cream jug.'
Both the Pigeoncotes had turned deadly pale. The mention of Dresden had thrown a sudden light on the situation. It was Wilfrid the Attache, a very superior young man, who rarely came within their social horizon, whom they had been entertaining unawares in the supposed character of Wilfrid the Snatcher. Lady Ernestine Pigeoncote, his mother, moved in circles which were entirely beyond their compass or ambitions, and the son would probably one day be an Ambassador. And they had rifled and despoiled his portmanteau! Husband and wife looked blankly and desperately at one another. It was Mrs. Peter who arrived first at an inspiration.
'How dreadful to think there are thieves in the house! We keep the drawing-room locked up at night, of course, but anything might be carried off while we are at breakfast.'
She rose and went out hurriedly, as though to assure herself that the drawing-room was not being stripped of its silverware, and returned a moment later, bearing a cream jug in her hands.
'There are eight cream jugs now, instead of seven,' she cried; 'this one wasn't there before. What a curious trick of memory, Mr. Wilfrid! You must have slipped downstairs with it last night and put it there before we locked up, and forgotten all about having done it in the morning.'
'One's mind often plays one little tricks like that,' said Mr. Peter, with desperate heartiness. 'Only the other day I went into the town to pay a bill, and went in again next day, having clean forgotten that I'd--'
'It is certainly the jug I bought for you,' said Wilfrid, looking closely at it; 'it was in my portmanteau when I got my bath-robe out this morning, before going to my bath, and it was not there when I unlocked the portmanteau on my return. Some one had taken it while I was away from the room.'
The Pigeoncotes had turned paler than ever. Mrs. Peter had a final inspiration.
'Get me my smelling-salts, dear,' she said to her husband; 'I think they're in the dressing-room.'
Peter dashed out of the room with glad relief; he had lived so long during the last few minutes that a golden wedding seemed within measurable distance.
Mrs. Peter turned to her guest with confidential coyness.
'A diplomat like you will know how to treat this as if it hadn't happened. Peter's little weakness; it runs in the family.'
'Good Lord! Do you mean to say he's a kleptomaniac, like Cousin Snatcher?'
'Oh, not exactly,' said Mrs. Peter, anxious to whitewash her husband a little greyer than she was painting him. 'He would never touch anything he found lying about, but he can't resist making a raid on things that are locked up. The doctors have a special name for it.
He must have pounced on your portmanteau the moment you went to your bath, and taken the first thing he came across. Of course, he had no motive for taking a cream jug; we've already got seven, as you know--not, of course, that we don't value the kind of gift you and your mother--hush here's Peter coming.'
Mrs. Peter broke off in some confusion, and tripped out to meet her husband in the hall.
'It's all right,' she whispered to him; 'I've explained everything. Don't say anything more about it.'
'Brave little woman,' said Peter, with a gasp of relief; 'I could never have done it.'
* * *
Diplomatic reticence does not necessarily extend to family affairs. Peter Pigeoncote was never able to understand why Mrs. Consuelo van Bullyon, who stayed with them in the spring, always carried two very obvious jewel-cases with her to the bath-room, explaining them to any one she chanced to meet in the corridor as her manicure and face-massage set.
The Occasional Garden
'Don't talk to me about town gardens,' said Elinor Rapsley; 'which means, of course, that I want you to listen to me for an hour or so while I talk about nothing else. 'What a nice-sized garden you've got,' people said to us when we first moved here. What I suppose they meant to say was what a nice-sized site for a garden we'd got. As a matter of fact, the size is all against it; it's too large to be ignored altogether and treated as a yard, and it's too small to keep giraffes in. You see, if we could keep giraffes or reindeer or some other species of browsing animal there we could explain the general absence of vegetation by a reference to the fauna of the garden: 'You can't have wapiti AND Darwin tulips, you know, so we didn't put down any bulbs last year.' As it is, we haven't got the wapiti, and the Darwin tulips haven't survived the fact that most of the cats of the neighbourhood hold a parliament in the centre of the tulip bed; that rather forlorn looking strip that we intended to be a border of alternating geranium and spiraea has been utilised by the cat-parliament as a division lobby. Snap divisions seem to have been rather frequent of late, far more frequent than the geranium blooms are likely to be. I shouldn't object so much to ordinary cats, but I do complain of having a congress of vegetarian cats in my garden; they must be vegetarians, my dear, because, whatever ravages they may commit among the sweet pea seedlings, they never seem to touch the sparrows; there are always just as many adult sparrows in the garden on Saturday as there were on Monday, not to mention newly-fledged additions. There seems to have been an irreconcilable difference of opinion between sparrows and Providence since the beginning of time as to whether a crocus looks best standing upright with its roots in the earth or in a recumbent posture with its stem neatly severed; the sparrows always have the last word in the matter, at least in our garden they do. I fancy that Providence must have originally intended to bring in an amending Act, or whatever it's called, providing either for a less destructive sparrow or a more indestructible crocus. The one consoling point about our garden is that it's not visible from the drawing-room or the smoking-room, so unless people are dinning or lunching with us they can't spy out the nakedness of the land. That is why I am so furious with Gwenda Pottingdon, who has practically forced herself on me for lunch on Wednesday next; she heard me offer the Paulcote girl lunch if she was up shopping on that day, and, of course, she asked if she might come too. She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of
