They're supposed to have the gift of speech at that one
moment of the year."
"Oh, _do_ let's _all_ go down to the cow-house and listen to what they've
got to say!" exclaimed Beryl, to whom anything was thrilling and amusing
if you did it in a troop.
Mrs. Steffink made a laughing protest, but gave a virtual consent by
saying, "We must all wrap up well, then." The idea seemed a
scatterbrained one to her, and almost heathenish, but if afforded an
opportunity for "throwing the young people together," and as such she
welcomed it. Mr. Horace Bordenby was a young man with quite substantial
prospects, and he had danced with Beryl at a local subscription ball a
sufficient number of times to warrant the authorised inquiry on the part
of the neighbours whether "there was anything in it." Though Mrs.
Steffink would not have put it in so many words, she shared the idea of
the Russian peasantry that on this night the beast might speak.
The cow-house stood at the junction of the garden with a small paddock,
an isolated survival, in a suburban neighbourhood; of what had once been
a small farm. Luke Steffink was complacently proud of his cow-house and
his two cows; he felt that they gave him a stamp of solidity which no
number of Wyandottes or Orpingtons could impart.
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