emed to contain chinks.

But Mrs. Wilkins took no pains. She just walked down the hill
singing--Mrs. Fisher could hear her--and picked up her husband in the
street as casually as if he were a pin. The three others, still in
bed, for it was not nearly time to get up, heard her as she passed
beneath their windows down the zigzag path to meet Mr. Wilkins, who was
coming by the morning train, and Scrap smiled, and Rose sighed, and
Mrs. Fisher rang her bell and desired Francesca to bring her her
breakfast in her room. All three had breakfast that day in their
rooms, moved by a common instinct to take cover.

Scrap always breakfasted in bed, but she had the same instinct
for cover, and during breakfast she made plans for spending the whole
day where she was. Perhaps, though, it wouldn't be as necessary that
day as the next. That day, Scrap calculated, Mellersh would be
provided for. He would want to have a bath, and having a bath at San
Salvatore was an elaborate business, a real adventure if one had a hot
one in the bathroom, and it took a lot of time. It involved the
attendance of the entire staff--Domenico and the boy Giuseppe coaxing
the patent stove to burn, restraining it when it burnt too fiercely,
using the bellows to it when it threatened to go out, relighting it
when it did go out; Francesca anxiously hovering over the tap
regulating its trickle, because if it were turned on too full the water
instantly ran cold, and if not full enough the stove blew up inside and
mysteriously flooded the house; and Costanza and Angela running up and
down bringing pails of hot water from the kitchen to eke out what the
tap did.

This bath had been put in lately, and was at once the pride and
the terror of the servants. It was very patent. Nobody quite
understood it. There were long printed instructions as to its right
treatment hanging on the wall, in which the word pericoloso recurred.
When Mrs. Fisher, proceeding on her arrival to the bathroom, saw this
word, she went back to her room again and ordered a sponge-bath
instead; and when the others found what using the bathroom meant, and
how reluctant the servants were to leave them alone with the stove, and
how Francesca positively refused to, and stayed with her back turned
watching the tap, and how the remaining servants waited anxiously
outside the door till the bather came safely out again, they too had
sponge-baths brought into their rooms instead.

Mr. Wilkins,