“You poor cake eater!” she cried with justifiable vigour. “You talk as if it needed a college education to lean a stuffed eelskin on a guy’s head. Of course you can do it. You’re behind the kitchen door, see?--and he comes in, see?--and you sim’ly bust him one, see? A feller with one arm and no legs could do it. And, say, if you want something to brace you up, think of all that money lying in the cistern, just waiting for us to come and dip for it!” “Ah!” said Mr. Molloy, brightening. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE AUNT YSOBEL POINTS THE WAY § 1 Claire Lippett sat in the kitchen of San Rafael, reading Pyke’s _Home Companion_. It was Mr. Wrenn’s kindly custom to bring back a copy for her each week on the day of publication, thus saving her an outlay of twopence. She was alone in the house, for Kay was up in London doing some shopping, and Mr. Wrenn, having come in and handed over the current number, had gone off for a game of chess with his friend, Cornelius. She was not expecting to be alone long. Muffins lay on the table, all ready to be toasted; a cake which she had made herself stood beside them; and there was also a new tin of anchovy paste--all of which dainties were designed for the delectation of Hash Todhunter, her fiancé, who would shortly be coming to tea. As a rule, Pyke’s _Home Companion_ absorbed Claire’s undivided attention, for she was one of its most devoted supporters; but this evening she found her mind wandering, for there was that upon it which not even Cordelia Blair’s _Hearts Aflame_ could conjure away. Claire was worried. On the previous day a cloud had fallen on her life, not exactly blotting out the sunshine, but seeming to threaten some such eclipse in the near future. She had taken Hash to John Street for a formal presentation to her mother, and it was on the way home that she had first observed the approach of the cloud. Hash’s manner had seemed to her peculiar. A girl who has just become romantically betrothed to a man does not expect that man, when they are sitting close together on the top of an omnibus, to talk moodily of the unwisdom of hasty marriages. It pains and surprises her when he mentions friends of his who, plunging hot-heatedly into matrimony, spent years of subsequent regret. And when, staring woodenly before him, he bids her look at Samson, Doctor Crippen and other celebrities who were not fortunate in their domestic lives, she feels a certain alarm. And such had been the trend of Hash Todhunter’s conversation, coming home from John Street. Claire, recalling the more outstanding of his dicta, felt puzzled and unhappy, and not even the fact that Cordelia Blair had got her hero into a ruined mill with villains lurking on the ground floor and dynamite stored in the basement could enchain her interest. She turned the page listlessly and found herself confronted by Aunt Ysobel’s Chats With My Girls.