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"I have your permission, I hope?" he said witheringly. "Certainly, certainly," said Puffin. "Now get your glass, Major. You'll feel better in a minute or two." Major Flint would have liked to have kept up this magnificent attitude, but the smell of Puffin's steaming glass beat dignity down, and after glaring at him, he limped back to the cupboard for his whisky bottle.
She crossed the street and tip-toed along the pavement to where the red light from Captain Puffin's window shone like a blurred danger-signal through the mist. From inside came a loud duet of familiar voices: sometimes they spoke singly, sometimes together.
"Yes?" she said. "What was that?" "Captain Puffin," began the Major. Then Miss Mapp remembered it all. "I hope, Major Flint," she said, "that you will not find it necessary to mention Captain Puffin's name to me. I wish him nothing but well, but he and his are no concern of mine. I have the charity to suppose that he was quite drunk on the occasion to which I imagine you allude.
Brimming with emotion, she sang it softly to herself as she undressed, and blamed herself very much for ever having thought that dear Major Benjy She peeped out of her window when she had extinguished her light, but fortunately the singing had ceased. To-night, however, the epoch of Puffin's second big tumbler was not accompanied by harmonious developments.
But whatever the cause," here she dropped her eyes, "the Major having sent the challenge packed his portmanteau. He ran away, dear Diva, and met Captain Puffin at the station running away too." "But did " began Diva. "Yes, dear, the note on Captain Puffin's table to his housekeeper said he was called away suddenly. What called him away? Cowardice, dear! How ignoble it all is.
When he mistakenly thought he had done so, he hastily refilled his glass, taking unusually stiff doses for fear of not getting another opportunity, and altogether omitting to ask Puffin's leave for these maraudings.
"Puffin's?" Lucas nodded. Puffin's was a cosy house of sustenance in a half-new street on the site of the razed slums of St. Giles's. He would not frequent the orthodox tea-houses, which were all alike and which had other serious disadvantages. He adventured into the unusual, and could always demonstrate that what he found was subtly superior to anything else. "That affair still on?"
Puffin's brazen optimism was but a tinkling cymbal, and the Major did not feel like tinkling at all. He but snorted and glowered, revolving in his mind how to square Miss Mapp. Allied with her, if she could but be won over, he felt he could face the rest of Tilling with indifference, for hers would be the most penetrating shafts, the most stinging pleasantries.
He was not sure whether Puffin had put the bottle by his chair or behind the coal-scuttle, and was quite ignorant of the fact that wherever it was, it was empty. Amorous reminiscences to-night had been the accompaniment to Puffin's second tumbler. "Devilish fine woman she was," he said, "and that was the last that Benjamin Flint ever saw of her. She went up to the hills next morning "
Then the junk's mizzen-mast began to bend ominously, and before long, amidst more shrieks and yells, it snapped off short and collapsed on the poop, knocking one elderly Chinaman and two children into the water as it fell. It was followed almost immediately afterwards by the Puffin's flying jib-boom.
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