all her puff."
Putney was inconvenient enough, the dear knows, but the Putney kitchen
was a joke to this one, where the kitchen range you can only describe
"as a fair scandal," and nothing else!

If she means to take the landlord's offer, later on, and to take this
place as it stands, she's going to have everything pretty different.

I should be sorry if she did; I like the place to be an utter
anachronism in our utilitarian twentieth century, just as it is. I don't
mind the honeycomb of draughts. I can put up with the soft, cave-like
gloom of it----

It was this gloom that prevented me from seeing, at first, that there
was anybody in the kitchen but cook, who was busily beating up batter
for light cakes in a big, yellow, white-lined bowl.

"Is the tea made?" I said.

It was not; the silver teapot, with the tea in it, was being heated on
the hob.

I moved to take up the singing kettle. It was then that a tall man's
form that had been sitting on a settle on the other side of the fire
rose and came towards me.

The red glow of the fire through the bars shone on the silver buttons
and on the laurel-green cloth and on the high boots of a chauffeur's
livery. Of course! This was the man who had driven over the people who
had come in the car.

But above the livery a voice spoke, a voice that I knew, a voice that I
could hardly believe was speaking to me here.

"Allow me," said this softly inflected Irish voice. And the kettle was
gently but firmly taken out of my hand by the hand of--the Honourable
James Burke.

I gave such a start of surprise that it is a mercy I did not jolt
against that kettle and send a stream of scalding hot water over the
laurel-green-cloth-clad knees of the man before me.

And I said exactly what people always say in meloramas when they are
surprised at meeting anybody--thus showing that melodrama is not always
so utterly unlike real life.

I cried "You!"

"Myself," announced the Honourable Jim, smiling down at me as he deftly
took the silver teapot from me and filled first that and then the
hot-water jug on the tray that was already laid on the big table. "And
what is all this emotion at the sight of me? Is it too much to hope that
it's pleasure? Or is it just amazement?"

"I--I certainly never expected to s-see you," I spoke falteringly in my
great surprise, "or--or like this!" I glanced at the gleam of the livery
buttons. "May I ask what in the world you are doing in those clothes