Free Maggie MacKeever by Fair Fatality

George’s Hospital, where the western entrance to the metropolis was marked by an ascent from Knightsbridge to the turnpike. Wistfully, Sara gazed into the distance. It would be very nice to proceed along that thoroughfare, she thought—in an opposite direction. To dream of escape from her servitude, alas, was to bay at the moon.
    Miss Valentine, mooning at the distant prospect, failed to note that her arrival at Hyde Park Corner had coincided with that of a circus menagerie. Venerable as Confucious was, his senses remained acute. He squirmed out of Sara’s grasp, tumbled to the cobblestones, set off in pursuit of the lumbering wagons, while the startled Sara wondered if he’d broken his wretched little neck, or some less important bones. Events soon proved the futility of this hope.
    To here describe Confucious’s encounter with the circus menagerie and the havoc he wrought, especially in reference to the dancing bear, would in no way advance this tale. Suffice it to say that great confusion reigned, and considerable ill-feeling ensued. Indeed, Miss Valentine was in the novel position of having a violin brandished beneath her nose by the bear’s irate owner when she spotted a familiar vehicle barreling along the roadway. Abandoning all dignity, Sara jerked away from the bear’s angry owner and ran out into the street, waving her arms. “Jevon!” she wailed.
    Though Mr. Rutherford was long accustomed to being accosted by females, this particular episode caused his brows to climb. Nonetheless, he dealt with the situation admirably. In less time than it would take to properly relate, he had installed Miss Valentine and a resentful Confucious in his eye-catching sprung whiskey, which had a vermilion chassis, blue ironwork and violet base.
    “Thank God for your arrival!” Miss Valentine sighed, and tried to set her disheveled self to rights. “I do not hesitate to confess that I had no notion what I should do next. I am very grateful to you for providing rescue.”
    “Then you may repay me by keeping that misbegotten cur at a distance!” responded Mr. Rutherford, with an unfriendly glance at Confucious. “What the deuce does Georgiana mean, sending you out without an escort?”
    “An escort?” Sara wrinkled her nose. “You forget that I am a mere servant. Beside, Confucious would not permit anyone to bother me.”
    With that assertion, there was no quarreling; a steady growling from the Pekinese provided a background to their conversation. “No,” Jevon replied ironically. “He will merely make you pay the price of his vindictiveness. My poor Sara! Shall we manage to lose the beast?”
    Tempting as was this notion, Miss Valentine, after the briefest struggle, nobly set it aside. “I wish you would be more serious!” she scolded. “A few days past you said that you would do anything within your power to assist Jaisy. Did you mean it, Jevon? Because if you did I wish that you might tell me what to do!”
    Jevon recalled saying nothing of the sort, at least not in regard to his brattish sister; and he did recall his determination to avoid becoming entangled in that damsel’s kick-ups. “What’s this?” he equivocated. “You at point nonplus, my Sara? I cannot credit it.”
    “You could, had you not been taken up wholly with your own pursuits!” snapped Sara, and then flushed as she recalled the rumor that her companion’s pursuits currently centered around a pretty opera dancer. “Forgive me; I should not have said that.”
    Jevon, guessing the cause of Miss Valentine’s reddened cheeks, grinned. “No, you should not! First of all, you should not listen to vulgar gossip; secondly, that I am the subject of gossip is altogether your fault.” Even in her present disheveled and bewildered condition, his Sara was a deuced pretty female, he observed. “I would not be making other females the object of gallantry, had you not sent me off with a flea in my ear!”
    Did he think she held him in aversion?