faint, soft bleating sound. Even on ordinary social occasions, when meeting this bloke as man to man and with a clear conscience, I could never be completely at my ease; and now those eyebrows seemed to pierce me like a knife.
“Come in here,” he said, lugging me into the room. “We don’t want to wake the whole house. Now,” he said, depositing me on the carpet and closing the door and doing a bit of eyebrow-work, “kindly inform me what is this latest manifestation of insanity?”
It seemed to me that a light and cheery laugh might help the thing along. So I had a pop at one.
“Don’t gibber!” said my genial host. And I’m bound to admit that the light and cheery hadn’t come out quite as I’d intended.
I pulled myself together with a strong effort.
“Awfully sorry about all this,” I said in a hearty sort of voice. “The fact is, I thought you were Tuppy.”
“Kindly refrain from inflicting your idiotic slang on me. What do you mean by the adjective ‘tuppy’?”
“It isn’t so much an adjective, don’t you know. More of a noun, I should think, if you examine it squarely. What I mean to say is, I thought you were your nephew.”
“You thought I was my nephew? Why should I be my nephew?”
“What I’m driving at is, I thought this was his room.”
“My nephew and I changed rooms.