“I don’t understand.”
“I, on the contrary, did—the moment I received Miss Vining’s letter. I saw it all. You pawned that brooch, Stanley! I know you so well.”
I drew myself up.
“You cannot know me very well, Aunt Julia,” I said, coldly, “if you think that of me. And allow me to say, while on this subject, that your suspicions are unworthy of an aunt.”
“Never mind what they’re unworthy of. Open that drawer.”
“Break it open?”
“Break it open.”
“With a poker?”
“With anything you please. But opened it shall be, now, and in my presence.”
I gazed at her haughtily.
“Aunt Julia,” I said, “let us get this thing straight. You wish me to take a poker or some other blunt instrument and smash that bureau?”
“I do.”
“Think well.”
“I have done all the thinking necessary.”
“So be it!” I said.
So I took the poker, and I set about that bureau as probably no bureau has ever been set about since carpentry first began. And there, gleaming in the ruins, was the brooch.
“Aunt Julia,” I said, “a little trust, a little confidence, a little faith, and this might have been avoided.”
She gulped pretty freely.
“Stanley,” she said at last, “I wronged you.”
“You did.”
“I—I—well, I’m sorry.”
“You may well be, Aunt Julia,” I said.
And, pursuing my advantage, I ground the woman into apologetic pulp beneath what practically amounted to an iron heel. And in that condition, Corky, she still remains. How long it will last one cannot say, but for the time being I am the blue-eyed boy and I have only to give utterance to my lightest whim to have her jump six feet to fulfil it. So, when I said I wanted to ask you to dinner here tonight, she practically smiled. Let us go into the library, old horse, and trifle with the cigars. They are some special ones I had sent up from that place in Piccadilly.
Colophon
Ukridge Stories
was published between 1924 and 1926 by
P. G. Wodehouse.
This ebook was produced for
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B. Timothy Keith,
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Portrait of Paul Léautaud,
a painting completed in 1915 by
Michele Catti.
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League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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