“Hurroo! who’s swore now?” cried Lord Gawdor.
“I didn’t; I only repeated what he said, and Mr Boxall said he agreed with him——”
“I _say_!” cried Lord Gawdor, a happy recollection crossing his mind, “did you hear what Selina was saying all the time before gran’ma rang the bell for Biddy to take her out?”
“Yes; she was shouting ‘Grass-eye—grass-eye!’ What did she mean?”
“I’d told her before tea that Mr Boxall had a glass eye, and if she was good maybe he’d take it out and show it to her.”
“Oh, that was it, was it?” said Doris. Then the pair ceased conversation and hung, leaning over the banister rails, in silence, watching the dishes going in and coming out.
Patsy was greatly in evidence going and coming, and so busy that he never once glanced up. He was carrying, just now, a _vol au vent_ in a silver dish; he paused in his passage across the hall with it, sniffed at it, stuck his thumb in it, sucked his thumb, wiped it on the side of his trousers, and then vanished into the dining-room with the dish.
“I hope the old General will have some of that,” murmured Doris.
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General Grampound and Mr Boxall were non-smokers, and as Mr Boxall was also a teetotaler, and the General was talking politics, Dicky Fanshawe found things rather dull in the dining-room when the ladies had withdrawn.
Things were almost as dull in the drawing-room, for Lady Seagrave was deaf, and Lady Molyneux was stupid.
I must have presented Patsy very badly if you have not discovered that he was the possessor of an “eye”—the eye of an observer. The faculty of observation given to him by nature and developed amongst the wild things of the woods was exercised to the full amidst the new surroundings in which he found himself.
He had sized up Mr Boxall. He had overheard the conversation between General Grampound and his nephew; he, whilst circulating with dishes and plates behind the chairs of the guests at table, had gauged the relationship of each to each. Though half their conversation was Greek to him, the falsity of it was not; and there was not a glance between Violet and Dicky, a side glance of Mr Boxall’s, a grimace of General Grampound’s, that escaped the awful eye of Patsy.