Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/65

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THE LIE ABSOLUTE
53

anything was enough to upset one in whose life nothing ever happened. But no one had the right.

She went into the kitchen to give the necessary orders.

"Not the mince," she said; "or, stay. Yes, that would do, too. You must cook the fowl that was for to-night's dinner—and Jane can go down to the village for something else for to-night. And salad and raspberries. And I will put out some wine. My cousin, Mr. Courtenay, has come home from India. He will lunch with me."

"Master Bob," said the cook, as the kitchen door closed, "well, if I ever did! He's a married man by this time, with young folkses growing up around him, I shouldn't wonder. He never did look twice the same side of the road where she was. Poor Miss Dolly!"

Most of us are mercifully ignorant of the sympathy that surrounds us.

"It's wonderful," he said, when she rejoined him in the drawing-room. "I feel like the Prodigal Son. When I think of the drawing-rooms I've seen. The gim-crack trumpery, the