"Does he care if my children are hungry?" Denzil tossed the water greedily down his throat almost at a gulp, as if it were brandy. "Madam," he said, smacking his lips, "I do care. I care intensely. Few things in life would grieve me more deeply than to hear that a child, a dear little child--the Beautiful in a nutshell--had suffered hunger. You wrong me." His voice was tremulous with the sense of injury. Tears stood in his eyes. "Wrong you? I've no wish to wrong you," said Mrs. Crowl. "I should like to hang you." "Don't talk of such ugly things," said Denzil, touching his throat nervously. "Well, what have you been doin' all this time?" "Why, what should I be doing?" "How should I know what became of you? I thought it was another murder." "What!" Denzil's glass dashed to fragments on the floor. "What do you mean?" But Mrs. Crowl was glaring too viciously at Mr. Crowl to reply. He understood the message as if it were printed. It ran: "You have broken one of my best glasses. You have annihilated threepence, or a week's school fees for half the family." Peter wished she would turn the lightning upon Denzil, a conductor down whom it would run innocuously. He stooped down and picked up the pieces as carefully as if they were cuttings from the Koh-i-noor. Thus the lightning passed harmlessly over his head and flew toward Cantercot. "What do I mean?" Mrs. Crowl echoed, as if there had been no interval. "I mean that it would be a good thing if you had been murdered." "What unbeautiful ideas you have, to be sure!" murmured Denzil. "Yes; but they'd be useful," said Mrs. Crowl, who had not lived with Peter all these years for nothing. "And if you haven't been murdered what have you been doing?" "My dear, my dear," put in Crowl, deprecatingly, looking up from his quadrupedal position like a sad dog, "you are not Cantercot's keeper." "Oh, ain't I?" flashed his spouse. "Who else keeps him I should like to know?" Peter went on picking up the pieces of the Koh-i-noor. "I have no secrets from Mrs. Crowl" Denzil explained courteously. "I have been working day and night bringing out a new paper. Haven't had a wink of sleep for three nights." Peter looked up at his bloodshot eyes with respectful interest. "The capitalist met me in the street--an old friend of mine--I was overjoyed at the _rencontre_ and told him the idea I'd been brooding over for months and he promised to stand all the racket." "What sort of a paper?" said Peter. "Can you ask? To what do you think I've been devoting my days and nights but to the cultivation of the Beautiful?" "Is that what the paper will be devoted to?" "Yes. To the Beautiful." "I know," snorted Mrs. Crowl, "with portraits of actresses." "Portraits? Oh, no!" said Denzil. "That would be the True--not the Beautiful." "And what's the name of the paper?" asked Crowl. "Ah, that's a secret, Peter. Like Scott, I prefer to remain anonymous."