"Kind of old-fashioned red." Chivers smiled with the pride of being thus able to testify, but the next instant his smile went out. "It's the only one left--on the old west wall."
His visitor's mirth, at this, quickly enough revived. "My dear fellow, I'm not alluding to the sole ornament of the garden, but to the young lady at present in the morning-room. Do you happen to have noticed if she's pretty?"
Chivers stood queerly rueful. "Laws, sir--it's a matter I mostly notice; but isn't it, at the same time, sir, a matter--like--of taste?"
"Pre-eminently. That's just why I appeal with such confidence to yours."
The old man acknowledged with a flush of real embarrassment a responsibility he had so little invited. "Well, sir,--mine was always a sort of fancy for something more merry-like."
"She isn't merry-like then, poor Miss Prodmore?" Captain Yule's attention, however, dropped before the answer came, and he turned off the subject with an "Ah, if you come to that, neither am I! But it doesn't signify," he went on. "What are _you_?" he more sociably demanded.
Chivers clearly had to think a bit. "Well, sir, I'm not quite _that_. Whatever has there been to make me, sir?" he asked in dim extenuation.
"How in the world do _I_ know? I mean to whom do you belong?"
Chivers seemed to scan impartially the whole field. "If you could just only _tell_ me, sir! I quite seem to waste away--for someone to take an order of."
Clement Yule, by this time, had become aware he was amusing. "Who pays your wages?"
"No one at all, sir," said the old man very simply.
His friend, fumbling an instant in a waistcoat pocket, produced something that his hand, in obedience to a little peremptory gesture and by a trick of which he had unlearned, through scant custom, the neatness, though the propriety was instinctive, placed itself in a shy practical relation to. "Then there's a sovereign. And I haven't many!" the young man, turning away resignedly, threw after it.
Chivers, for an instant, intensely studied him. "Ah, then, shouldn't it stay in the family?"
Clement Yule wheeled round, first struck, then, at the sight of the figure made by his companion in this offer, visibly touched. "I think it does, old boy."
Chivers kept his eyes on him now. "I've served your house, sir."