His mind was now set upon the
hardest problem it had ever had to cope with, that problem being how to so
ennoble the spectre cook of Bangletop that she might outrank the ancestors
of his landlord in the other world--the shady world, he called it. The
living cook had been induced to remain partly by threats and partly by
promises of increased pay; the threats consisting largely of expressions
of determination to leave her in England, thousands of miles from her home
in Massachusetts, deserted and forlorn, the poor woman being
insufficiently provided with funds to get back to America, and holding in
her veins a strain of Celtic blood quite large enough to make the idea of
remaining an outcast in England absolutely intolerable to her. At the end
of seven days Terwilliger was seemingly as far from the solution of his
problem as ever, and at the grand fete given by himself and wife on the
afternoon of the seventh day of his trial, to the Earl of Mugley, the one
in whom Ariadne was interested, he seemed almost rude to his guests, which
the latter overlooked, taking it for the American way of entertaining.
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