Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 70).djvu/70

"Er—how are you?" I said.

"How do you do?"

Her voice put the lid on it. It might have been Honoria herself talking. Honoria Glossop has a voice like a lion-tamer making some authoritative announcement to one of the troupe, and so had this girl. I backed away convulsively and sprang upwards as my foot stubbed itself against something squashy. A sharp yowl rent the air, followed by an indignant cry, and I turned to see Aunt Jane, on all fours, trying to put things right with the cat, which had gone to earth under the sofa. She gave me a look, and I could see that her worst fears had been realized.

At this juncture dinner was announced—not before I was ready for it.

"JEEVES," I said, when I got him alone that night, "I am no faint-heart, but I am inclined to think that this binge is going to prove a shade above the odds."

"You are not enjoying your visit, sir?"

"I am not, Jeeves. Have you seen Miss Pringle?"

"Yes, sir. From a distance."

"The best way to see her. Did you observe her keenly?

"Yes, sir."

"Did she remind you of anybody?

"She appeared to me to bear a remarkable likeness to her cousin, Miss Glossop, sir."

"Her cousin! You don't mean to say she's Honoria Glossop's cousin? '

"Yes, sir. Mrs. Pringle was a Miss Blatherwick—the younger of two sisters, the elder of whom married Sir Roderick Glossop."

"Great Scott! That accounts for the resemblance."

"Yes, sir."

"And what a resemblance, Jeeves! She even talks like Miss Glossop.'

"Indeed, sir? I have not yet heard Miss Pringle speak."

"You have missed little. And what it amounts to, Jeeves, is that, while nothing will induce me to let old Sippy down, I can see that this visit is going to try me high. At a pinch I could stand the Prof. and wife. I could even make the effort of a lifetime and bear up against Aunt Jane. But to expect a man to mix daily with the girl Heloise—and to do it, what is more, on lemonade, which is all there was to drink at dinner—is to ask too much of him. What shall I do, Jeeves?"

"I think that you should avoid Miss Pringle's society as much as possible."

"The same great thought had occurred to me," I said.

It is all very well, though, to talk airily about avoiding a female's society; but when you are living in the same house with her and she doesn't want to avoid you, it takes a bit of doing. It is a peculiar thing in life that the people you most particularly want to edge away from always seem to cluster round like a poultice. I hadn't been twenty-four hours in the place before I perceived that I was going to see a lot of this pestilence.

She was one of those girls you're always meeting on the stairs and in passages. I couldn't go into a room without seeing her drift in a minute later. And if I walked in the garden, she was sure to leap out at me from a laurel bush or the onion bed or something. By about the tenth day I had begun to feel absolutely haunted.

"Jeeves," I said, "I have begun to feel absolutely haunted."

"Sir?"

"This woman dogs me. I never seem to get a moment to myself. Old Sippy was supposed to come here to make a study of the Cambridge colleges, and she took me round about fifty-seven this morning. This afternoon I went to sit in the garden, and she popped up through a trap and was in my midst. This evening she cornered me in the morning-room. It's getting so that when I have a bath I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find her nestling in the soap dish."

"Extremely trying, sir."

"Dashed so! Have you any remedy to suggest? . "

"Not at the moment, sir. Miss Pringle does appear to be distinctly interested in you, sir. She was asking me questions this morning respecting your mode of life in London."

"What!"

"Yes, sir."

I stared at the man in horror. A ghastly thought had struck me. I quivered like an aspen.

At lunch that day a curious thing had happened. We had just finished mangling the cutlets, and I was sitting back in my chair, taking a bit of an easy before being allotted my slab of boiled pudding, when, happening to look up, I caught the girl Heloise's eye fixed on me in what seemed to me a rather rummy manner. I didn't think much about it at the time, because boiled pudding is a thing you have to give your undivided attention to if you want to do yourself justice; but now, recalling the episode in the light of Jeeves's words, the full sinister meaning of the thing seemed to come home to me. Even at the moment, something about that look had struck me as oddly familiar, and now I suddenly saw why. It had been the identical look which I had observed in the