But Braddock paid no heed to this jocularity, or even to Mrs. Jasher, to whom he had been so lately engaged. All his soul was in the mummy case, and as soon as he recovered his breath, he loudly proclaimed his joy at this miraculous recovery of the precious article.
“Mine! mine!” he roared, and his words ran violently through the frosty air.
“Be calm, sir,” advised Hope—“be calm.”
“Calm! calm!” bellowed Braddock, struggling to a standing position. “Oh, confound you, sir, how can I be calm when I find what I have lost? You have a mean, groveling soul, Hope, not the soaring spirit of a collector.”
“There is no need to be rude to Archie, father,” corrected Lucy sharply.
“Rude! Rude! I am never rude. But this mummy.” Braddock peered closely at it and rapped the wood to assure himself it was no phantom. “Yes! it is my mummy, the mummy of Inca Caxas. Now I shall learn how the Peruvians embalmed their royal dead. Mine! mine! mine!” He crooned like a mother over a child, caressing the coffin; then suddenly drew himself upright and fixed Mrs. Jasher with an indignant eye. “So it was you, madam, who stole my mummy,” he declared venomously, “and I thought of making you my wife. Oh, what an escape I have had. Shame, woman, shame!”
Mrs. Jasher stared, then her face grew redder than the rouge on her cheeks, and she stamped furiously in the neat Louis Quinze slippers in which she had in judiciously come out.
“How dare you say what you have said?” she cried, her voice shrill and hard with anger. “Mr. Hope has been saying the same thing. Are you both mad? I never set eyes on the horrid thing in my life. And only to-night you told me that you loved—”