n't a makeshift," persisted Wally. "It was a dream. I
say, Miss de Lisle, can you make pikelets?"

"Yes, of course," said the cook-lady. "Do you like them?"

"I'd go into a trap for a pikelet," said Wally, warming to his task.
"Oh, Norah, do ask Miss de Lisle if she'll make some for tea!"

"Oh, do!" pleaded Norah. As a matter of stern fact, Norah preferred
bread-and-butter to pikelets, but the human beam in the cook-lady's
eye was not to be neglected. "We haven't had any for ages." She cast
about for further encouragement for the beam. "Miss de Lisle, I
suppose you have a very special cookery-book?"

"I make my own recipes," said the cook-lady with pride. "But for the
war I should have brought out my book."

"By Jove, you don't say so!" said Jim. "I say, Norah, you'll have to
get that when it comes out."

"Rather!" said Norah. "I wonder would it bother you awfully to show
me some day how to make meringues? I never can get them right."

"We'll see," said Miss de Lisle graciously. "And would you really
like pikelets for tea?"

"Please--if it wouldn't be too much trouble."

"Very well." Jim held the door open for the cook-lady as she marched
out. Suddenly she paused.

"You will see the housekeeper, Mr. Linton?"

"Oh, certainly!" said David Linton hastily. The door closed; behind
it they could hear a tread, heavy and martial, dying away.

"A fearsome woman!" said Mr. Linton. "Wally, you deserve a medal!
But are we always to lick the ground under the cook's feet in this
fashion?"

"Oh, she'll find her level," said Jim. "But you'd better tell Mrs.
Atkins not to offend her again. Talk to her like a father, Dad--say
she and Miss de Lisle are here to run the house, not to bother you and
Norah."

"It's excellent in theory," said his father sadly, "but in practice I
find my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth when these militant
females tackle me. And if you saw Mrs. Atkins you would realize how
difficult it would be for me to regard her as a daughter. But I'll do
my best."

Mrs. Atkins, admitted by the sympathetic Allenby, proved less fierce
than the cook-lady, although by no stretch of imagination could she
have been called pleasant.

"I have never worked with a cook as considered herself a lady," she
remarked. "It makes all very difficult, and no kitchen-maid, and am I
in authority or am I not? And such airs, turning up her nose at being
called Cook. Which if she is the cook, why