Chapter Sixteen
Phineas offered the lady a cake.
He had been toying idly with a leftover one (astonishing that there had been any left uneaten at all, for Bix was voracious in the extreme). Though it was undoubtedly a fine cake, as well as an intriguing one, he had been too nervous to eat even a morsel of it, and had merely been passing it from hand to hand as he waited. And then had come Wodebean, in a whirl of unexpected and unaccountable wrath; he had scarcely paused to question Phineas but had got hold of him by the arm, and snatched him away.
Disappearing from one chest and reappearing in another had been much as Phineas had supposed would happen. But finding Ilsevellian waiting on the other side — My Lady Silver, She of Disconcertingly Towering Eminence and Woefully Satirical Eye
