A Taste for Honey by H. F. Heard Page A

a horrible way. When I was a boy, we had a dog I never really liked. It used to bark and leap up on me—startling and dirtying. Yet when a car dashed over it and there it lay like a smashed bag, I felt not only quite sick, I was really sorry. These thoughts, of course, went in a flash through my mind. I was pretty certainly more tired than I realized.
    Mr. Mycroft was standing before me with a rather assured expression on his face.
    Before I had thought out the words, I found myself saying: “I’ll pay for the honey. I’m a complete recluse and never introduce anyone to anyone else. As to my movements, I have never needed anyone to advise me on them.”
    I stopped. I own I lacked the courage to meet Mr. Mycroft’s eye now that I was being deliberately rude, so I couldn’t judge how he took it. All I know is that he passed out of the room without a word. He was away for a few minutes, came back with a neatly made parcel with an ingenious handle made of the string, and named a ridiculously low figure. I fumbled a bit, and I am afraid was a little red as I paid.
    All he said was, “The string will hold quite securely. It saves the trouble of a basket being returned.”
    He held the door open and with a rather clumsy “Good day” I stepped out, hurried across the lawn, now in shadow, into the dusky path through the plantation and so down into the twilit sunken lane. My nerves must have been overstrung (perhaps I had been very discourteous). The whole place seemed unpleasantly still. Those silly, melodramatic lines from The Ancient Mariner kept running in my head:
    Like one that on a lonesome road
    Doth walk in fear and dread ,
    And having once turned round walks on ,
    And turns no more his head;
    Because he knows a frightful fiend
    Doth close behind him tread .
    I didn’t really feel at all comfortable until I was back in my own sitting room, with the lamp lit, the curtains drawn, and the door well bolted.

Chapter IV
    FLY TO SPIDER
    The next morning, however, I was quite cheerful. Only one thing seemed clear in the gay morning light. By observing my rightful impulse I had—at the cost of a moment’s unpleasantness—escaped what might well have turned out to be a permanent invasion by a loquacious, opinionated, fantastic old bore—the very thing, I repeat, that one lives in the country to avoid, the special terror of town clubs and gardens. I was well stocked with honey. I put the whole question out of my head—even of what I would do when my supplies again ran out.
    It seemed only a few days, however, before they did. It must, of course, have been a month, perhaps a little more. I remember that I evidently didn’t want to notice that I was running low, for it was Alice who drew my attention to it and I was vexed with her. It was really her fault. She should have seen that it was quite clear I did not want to be troubled. But somehow the poorer people are and the stupider, the more they seem to expect you always to be reasonable and clear and sensible.
    â€œYou ’ave only ’alf a pot an’ one comb now left, sir,” was her opening.
    â€œI know,” I said, as a silencer. It was as ineffective as my effort to stem the obituaries of the late Mrs. Heregrove.
    â€œAn’ you ’aven’t, sir, rightly even that: the combs run so in this ’ot weather.”
    I grunted. Human speech of any sort, however astringent, seemed only to act as warm water to a hemorrhage. “An’ where you’ll be getting your new lot I can’t but be wondering. There’s never a hive now all round the neighborhood. ’Iveless Hashton, that’s what my young man he called it the other day, an’ he’s right. He’s a cure, ’Iveless Hashton.”
    This was too much, to have the cold and clotted wit of Alice’s walker-out served to me after breakfast.
    â€œAlice,” I said, with a firmness which I don’t