ble in the morning to be full towards him, as she was at that moment
full, of nothing at all but loving-kindness? After all, she hadn't been
very long in heaven. Suppose she hadn't been in it long enough for
her to have become fixed in blandness? And only that morning what an
extraordinary joy it had been to find herself alone when she woke, and
able to pull the bed-clothes any way she liked!

Francesca had to nudge her. She was so much absorbed that she
did not notice the pudding.

"If," thought Mrs. Wilkins, distractedly helping herself, "I
share my room with Mellersh I risk losing all I now feel about him. If
on the other hand I put him in the one spare-room, I prevent Mrs.
Fisher and Lady Caroline from giving somebody a treat. True they don't
seem to want to at present, but at any moment in this place one or the
other of them may be seized with a desire to make somebody happy, and
then they wouldn't be able to because of Mellersh."

"What a problem," she said aloud, her eyebrows puckered.

"What is?" asked Scrap.

"Where to put Mellersh."

Scrap stared. "Why, isn't one room enough for him?" she asked?

"Oh yes, quite. But then there won't be any room left at all--
any room for somebody you may want to invite."

"I shan't want to," said Scrap.

"Or you," said Mrs. Wilkins to Mrs. Fisher. "Rose, of course,
doesn't count. I'm sure she would like sharing her room with her
husband. It's written all over her."

"Really--" said Mrs. Fisher.

"Really what?" asked Mrs. Wilkins, turning hopefully to her, for
she thought the word this time was the preliminary to a helpful
suggestion.

It was not. It stood by itself. It was, as before, mere frost.

Challenged, however, Mrs. Fisher did fasten it on to a sentence.
"Really am I to understand," she asked, "that you propose to reserve
the one spare-room for the exclusive use of your own family?"

"He isn't my own family," said Mrs. Wilkins. "He's my husband.
You see--"

"I see nothing," Mrs. Fisher could not this time refrain from
interrupting--for what an intolerable trick. "At the most I hear, and
that reluctantly."

But Mrs. Wilkins, as impervious to rebuke as Mrs. Fisher had
feared, immediately repeated the tiresome formula and launched out into
a long and excessively indelicate speech about the best place for the
person she called Mellersh to sleep in.

Mellersh--Mrs. Fisher, remembering the Thomases and Johns and
Alfreds and Roberts of her