to silence Miss Mapp by his intoxicated bargain, had been the prime cause of all this misery. He could not even, for fear of that all-seeing eye in Miss Mapp’s garden-room, go across to the house of the unforgiven sea-captain, and by a judicious recital of his woes induce him to beg Miss Mapp’s forgiveness instantly. He would have to wait till the kindly darkness fell.... “Mere slavery!” he exclaimed with passion.
A tap at his sitting-room door interrupted the chain of these melancholy reflections, and his permission to enter was responded to by Puffin himself. The Major bounced from his seat.
“You mustn’t stop here,” he said in a low voice, as if afraid that he might be overheard. “Miss Mapp may have seen you come in.”
Puffin laughed shrilly.
“Why, of course she did,” he gaily assented. “She was at her window all right. Ancient lights, I shall call her. What’s this all about now?”
“You must go back,” said Major Flint agitatedly. “She must see you go back. I can’t explain now. But I’ll come across after dinner when it’s dark. Go; don’t wait.”
He positively hustled the mystified Puffin out of the house, and Miss Mapp’s face, which had grown sharp and pointed with doubts and suspicions when she observed him enter Major Benjy’s house, dimpled, as she saw him return, into her sunniest smiles. “Dear Major Benjy,” she said, “he has refused to see him,” and she cut the string of the large cardboard box which had just arrived from the dyer’s with the most pleasurable anticipations....
Well, it was certainly very magnificent, and Miss Greele was quite right, for there was not the faintest tinge
