serious inconvenience--result to those unhappy ones who have delayed to execute the commands of Her Radiancy! And on this occasion she is resolute: she says the thing must and shall be done: and she has ordered up ten thousand additional bamboos!' With these words he left them, and they heard him lock and bar the door on the outside.
`I told you how it would end!' moaned the elder traveler, wringing his hands, and quite forgetting in his anguish that he had himself proposed the expedition, and had never predicted anything of the sort. `Oh, that we were well out of this miserable business!'
`Courage!' cried the younger cheerily. `Haec olim meminisse juvabit! The end of all this will be glory!'
`Glory without the L!' was all the poor old man could say, as he rocked himself to and fro on the malachite bench. `Glory without the L!'
`AUNT MATTIE!'
`My child?'
`Would you mind writing it down at once? I shall be quite certain to forget it if you don't!'
`My dear, we really must wait till the cab stops. How can I possibly write anything in the midst of all this jolting?'
`But really I shall be forgetting it!'
Clara's voice took the plaintive tone that her aunt never knew how to resist, and with a sigh the old lady drew forth her ivory tablets and prepared to record the amount that Clara had just spent at the confectioner's shop. Her expenditure was always made out of her aunt's purse, but the poor girl knew, by bitter experience, that sooner or later `Mad Mathesis' would expect an exact account of every penny that had gone, and she waited, with ill-concealed impatience, while the old lady turned the tablets over and over, till she had found the one headed `PETTY CASH'.
`Here's the place,' she said at last, `and here we have yesterday's luncheon duly entered. One glass lemonade (Why ca'n't you drink water, like me?), three sandwiches (They never put in half mustard enough. I told the young woman so, to her face; and she tossed her head--like her impudence!), and seven biscuits. Total one-and-two-pence. Well, now for to-day's?'
`One glass of lemonade--' Clara was beginning to say, when suddenly the cab drew up, and a courteous railway-porter was handing out the bewildered girl before she had had time to finish her sentence.
Her aunt pocketed the tablets instantly. `Business first,' she said: `petty cash--which is a form of pleasure, whatever you may think--afterwards.' And she proceeded to pay the driver, and to give voluminous orders about the luggage, quite deaf to the entreaties of her unhappy niece that she would enter the rest of the luncheon account. `My dear, you really must cultivate a more capacious mind!' was all the consolation she vouchsafed to the poor girl. `Are not the tablets of your memory wide enough to contain the record of one single luncheon?'
`Not wide enough! Not half wide enough!' was the passionate reply.