“Very well, then, let’s have him buried,” I said.

“Where?”

“In our garden.”

“Who by?”

“Palmer or Emily.”

Palmer and Emily are respectively the parlour- and house-maid.

“Both would say it was not the work for which they were engaged.  They would leave at the same time as Cook, if I asked them.”

“Who else can we get?” I asked.

“Yourself,” my wife made answer.

“Me?  But I can’t be seen by all the street burying a cat.”  I should explain that our only garden is in front of the house.

“If you wait till it is dark you needn’t be afraid of anyone seeing you,” protested my wife.

“And run the risk of being detected by some suspicious policeman.  No, thank you.”

“Then if you won’t do it yourself you must find someone who will.  It is our last hope of persuading Cook to stay.”

“By heaven!” I cried, looking at my watch, I am a quarter-of-an-hour late.  I must run.”

This was my customary device to evade the embarrassing dilemmas which my wife not infrequently thrust upon me at this hour.  So for the moment I escaped.  All day in the office I was fully occupied.  From time to time the memory of Dundee lying stark in the basement obtruded itself upon my thoughts, but I dismissed the vision as one does a problem one has not the courage to face.

The problem remained unsolved when I stepped out of the train on my return from the City.  To gain time for reflection I resolved to make a detour.  As I struck into an unfamiliar side street, I looked up, and there in front of me stood an undertaker’s shop.

The inspiration!  I entered.  From the back premises advanced to meet me the undertaker, with a visage tentatively wobegone, not yet knowing whether I was widower, orphan, businesslike executor or merely the busybody family friend.  I unfolded my difficulty.  Beneath the outer crust of professional melancholy there evidently seethed within the undertaker a lava of joviality.

“Certainly, Sir, certainly,” he said.  “It is not perhaps strictly in my line, but one of my assistants will be delighted to earn an extra shilling or so by obliging you.  What name and address?”

I joyfully gave both and made my way home.

Midway through dinner came a ring at the front-door bell.  Palmer interrupted her service to answer, and returned to me with a card on a salver.

“A gentleman to see you, Sir,” she announced.

“How strange, at this hour!  Who can it be?” asked my wife.

“The gentleman to bury Dundee,” I explained in a lowered voice, as I passed the visiting-card, deeply edged with black, across the table to her.

Next morning my wife was able to announce that Cook had consented to stay.  The burial of Dundee by a real undertaker had gratified her sense of the correct.  I departed to the City filled with self-complacency.