ment Rachel was scrubbing and
scraping a big baking-dish, portions of whose surface strongly resisted
her efforts, in spite of previous soaking. The assistant, looking about
him for new worlds to conquer, fell upon this dish.

"Here, here," said he, "let me have it. I'll use on it some of the
unconscious strength Mrs. Robeson credits me with."

But Rachel clung to the dish. "Proper housekeepers," she averred, "always
say 'That's all, thank you,' as soon as the china is done, and finish the
pots and kettles after the guest has gone back to pleasanter things."

"I see. Did you ever have a man for dish-wiper before?"

"Never a surgeon," admitted Miss Redding.

"Then you don't appreciate the fact that a man likes to do big things
which make the most show and get the credit for them."

He took the dish away from her by a dexterous little twist in which
conscious strength certainly asserted itself. Rachel, laughing, with a
dash of colour in cheeks which were normally of dark ivory tints, accepted
the dish-towel he handed her.

* * * * *

"Hallo, there," cried Wayne Carey's voice from the door. "You're having
more fun out here than we are in there, and that's not fair. The lord of
the manor is getting so chesty over the delights of a country home in a
February snowbank that he's becoming heavy company."

"No room for you here," returned the doctor, removing with a flourish the
last candied sugar lump from the bottom of the big dish, and beginning to
swash about vigorously in the hot water. "We do something besides talk out
here; we work. Our kitchen is so small we have to waste no time in steps;
as we dry the things we chuck them straight into their places."

Suiting the action to the word he caught up a shining cake-tin and cast it
straight at Carey. That gentleman dodged, but Anthony caught it, performed
upon it an imitation of the cymbals, then turned about and laid it in a
nest of similar tins upon a shelf in an open closet.

"Ah, but I'm well trained," he boasted.

"If you were you wouldn't put it away wet," observed Rachel slyly.

Anthony withdrew the tin, wiped it with much solicitude, and replaced it.

"These little technicalities are beyond me," he apologised. "Your real
athlete in kitchen work is your scientific man. See him dry that bean-pot
with the glass-towel. Now, I know better than that."

"Go away, all of you," commanded the mistress of the place. "Go