Читать книгу A Change in the Cabinet онлайн

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“Go out at once!” said Mary Smith.

He tried to say something about his hat and coat.

Some yards before them at the open door the noise of a carriage was heard and there were servants waiting. Behind them more servants. But Mary Smith knew her world.

It was a choice of evils, and George Mulross Demaine went out into the night, hatless and coatless. The policemen were pleased to see such familiarity among the great. They doubted not that the gentleman was taking the air, but they wondered why he walked so very rapidly eastward through Mayfair.

Meanwhile from the carriage the daughter of Theocritus C. Benson came out, not without decision, and very soon the rooms of that house were filled and even its Moravian music dominated by the acuteness of her laugh and the tremendous decision of her tread.

When every one had gone, one hat and coat remained. The footman pawned them: they were those of George Mulross Demaine.

He, poor fellow, saw in all this nothing but that eternity of bad luck to which he was born. When his wife asked him next day why he had left the Petheringtons’ so early, he told some ordinary lie: he had left indeed because one wiser than he had told him to leave, but he could make neither head nor tail of the whole affair: and his foot hurt him where the Bear had crushed it.