CHAPTER XXV—LUCK“Not a word to your mother,” Mr. Sheerug had warned Ruddy after his first interview with Duke Nineveh. “She wouldn’t understand—not yet. Um! Um!”
What he had meant was she would have understood too well. Ruddy communicated this urgent need for secrecy to Teddy. “Can’t make it out—what he’s up to.”
They watched carefully, feeling that whatever Mr. Sheerug was up to, it was something in which they also were concerned.
The first thing they noticed was that a proud-boy look was creeping over him—what Ruddy called an I-ate-the-canary look. For all his fatness he began to bustle. He began to make fusses if the meals weren’t punctual, to insist on his boots being properly blacked and to behave himself in general as though he were head of his household. He spoke vaguely of meeti
