e down again, completely happy and pleased, that the
servant incident occurred. Mabel was down the stairs slightly before him
and turned a smiling face up to him as he descended. "By Jove, it's
jolly," he said. "We'll be happy here," and he kissed her.

"You'd better see the kitchen. It's awfully nice;" and they went along.

At the kitchen door she paused and began in a mysterious whisper a long
account of the servants. "I think they'll turn out quite nice girls.
They're sisters, you know, and they're glad to be in a place together.
They've both got young men in the village. Fancy, the cook told me that
at Mrs. Wellington's where she was, at Chovensbury, she wasn't allowed
to use soda for washing up because Mrs. Wellington fussed so frightfully
about the pattern on her china! Fancy, in their family they've got
eleven brothers and sisters. Isn't it awful how those kind of people--"

Her voice got lower and lower. She seemed to Mark to be quivering with
some sort of repressed excitement, as though the two maids were some
rare exhibit which she had captured with a net and placed in the
kitchen, and whom it was rather thrilling to open the door upon and peep
at. He could hardly hear her voice and had to bend his head. It was dim
in the lobby outside the kitchen door. The dimness, her intense whispers
and her excitement made him feel that he was in some mysterious
conspiracy with her. The whole atmosphere of the house and of this tour
of inspection, which had been deliciously absorbing, became mysteriously
conspiratorial, unpleasing.

"...She's been to a school of cookery at Tidborough. She attended the
whole course!"

"Good. That's the stuff!"

"Hush!"

Why hush? What a funny business this was!

VIII

Mabel opened the kitchen door. "The master's come to see how nice the
kitchen looks."

Two maids in black dresses and an extraordinary amount of stiffly
starched aprons and caps and streamers rose awkwardly and bobbed awkward
little bows. One was very tall, the other rather short. The tall one
looked extraordinarily severe and the short one extraordinarily glum,
Mark thought, to have young men. Mabel looked from the girls to Mark and
from Mark to the girls, precisely as if she were exhibiting rare
specimens to her husband and her husband to her rare specimens. And in
the tone of one exhibiting pinned, dried, and completely impersonal
specimens, she announced, "They're sisters. Their name is Jinks."

Mark, exami