g you. It was Smithfield's idea."

"Smithfield!" cried Crane.

"Yes, sir. He had the notion, I think, that you might be very severe
with me, sir, and Smithfield is peculiar, he has a very sensitive
nature--"

"Well, upon my word," cried Crane, springing to his feet, "that is
exactly what Smithfield says about you. It seems to me I have a damned
queer houseful of servants."

The cook edged to the door.

"Perhaps it seems so, sir," she said. "Will that be all for to-night?"

"Yes. No," he added hastily, "I have one more thing to say to you,
Jane-Ellen, and it's this. Don't make the mistake of fancying that I
have taken this whole incident lightly. I don't. It really must not
happen again. Understand that clearly."

"You mean if that gentleman came back, you would dismiss me, sir?"

"I think I would," he answered.

"Even if it weren't my fault?"

"Was the fault entirely his, Jane-Ellen?"

"Ask him, sir."

"You know much more about it than he does. Was the fault entirely his?"

The cook wriggled her shoulders, crumpled her apron and seemed unwilling
to answer a direct question directly. At last an idea occurred to her.
She looked up brightly.

"It was the ice-cream, sir," she said. "I was trying to teach him how to
freeze ice-cream slowly. It ought to be done like this." And bending
over an imaginary freezer, she imitated with her absurdly small hand the
suave, gentle, rotary motion essential to the great American luxury.

As he stood looking down on her, it seemed to Crane extraordinarily
clear how it had all happened, so clear indeed that for a second it
almost seemed as if he himself were in the place of the culprit whose
conduct he had just been condemning.

He stepped back hastily.

"No, Jane-Ellen," he said, "it was not all his fault. Of that you have
convinced me."

She stretched out her hand to the door.

"Will that be all, sir? The cook, you know, has to get up so very early
in the morning."

He tried to counteract the feeling of pity and shame that swept over him
at the realization that this young and delicate creature had to get up
at dawn to work for him and his guests. The effort made his tone rather
severe as he said:

"Yes, that's all. Goodnight."

"Good night, sir," she answered, with her unruffled sweetness, and was
gone.

He stood still a moment, conscious of an unusual alertness both of mind
and emotion. And that very alertness made him aware that at that moment
there was a