lass."
He indicated an article of furniture which stood in front of the range,
at a distance of perhaps six feet from it, cutting the room in half.
This contrivance may be called a sofa, or it may be called a couch; but
it can only be properly described by the Midland word for it--squab. No
other term is sufficiently expressive. Its seat--five feet by two--was
very broad and very low, and it had a steep, high back and sides. All
its angles were right angles. It was everywhere comfortably padded; it
yielded everywhere to firm pressure; and it was covered with a grey and
green striped stuff. You could not sit on that squab and be in a
draught; yet behind it, lest the impossible should arrive, was a heavy
curtain, hung on an iron rod which crossed the room from wall to wall.
Not much imagination was needed to realise the joy and ecstasy of
losing yourself on that squab on a winter afternoon, with the range fire
roaring in your face, and the curtain drawn abaft.

Helen assumed the mathematical centre of the squab, and began to arrange
her skirts in cascading folds; she had posed her parasol in a corner of
it, as though the squab had been a railway carriage, which, indeed, it
did somewhat resemble.

"By the way, lass, what's that as swishes?" James demanded.

"What's what?"

"What's that as swishes?"

She looked puzzled for an instant, then laughed--a frank, gay laugh,
light and bright as aluminium, such as the kitchen had never before
heard.

"Oh!" she said. "It's my new silk petticoat, I suppose. You mean that?"
She brusquely moved her limbs, reproducing the unique and delicious
rustle of concealed silk.

"Ay!" ejaculated the old man, "I mean that."

"Yes. It's my silk petticoat. Do you like it?"

"I havena' seen it, lass."

She bent down, and lifted the hem of her dress just two inches--the
discreetest, the modestest gesture. He had a transient vision of
something fair--it was gone again.

"I don't know as I dislike it," said he.

He was standing facing her, his back to the range, and his head on a
level with the high narrow mantelpiece, upon which glittered a row of
small tin canisters. Suddenly he turned to the corner to the right of
the range, where, next to an oak cupboard, a velvet Turkish smoking cap
depended from a nail. He put on the cap, of which the long tassel curved
down to his ear. Then he faced her again, putting his hands behind him,
and raising himself at intervals on his small, well-polished toes. She
lifted her two hands simultaneously to her head, and began to draw pins
from her hat, which pins she placed one after another between her lips.
Then she lowered the hat carefully from her head, and transfixed it anew
with the pins.

"Will you mind hanging it on that nail?" she requested.

He took it, as though it had been of glass, and hung it on the nail.

Without her hat she looked as if she lived there, a jewel in a
pipe-case. She appeared to be just as much at home as he was. And they
were so at home together that there was no further necessity to strain
after a continuous conversation. With a vague smile she gazed round and
about, at the warm, cracked, smooth red tiles of the floor; at the
painted green walls, at a Windsor chair near the cupboard--a solitary
chair that had evidently been misunderstood by the large family of
relatives in the other room and sent into exile; at the pair of bellows
that hung on the wall above the chair, and the rich gaudiness of the
grocer's almanac above the bellows; at the tea-table, with its coarse
grey cloth and thick crockery spread beneath the window.

"So you have all your meals here?" she ventured.

"Ay," he said. "I have what I call my meals here."

"Why," she cried, "don't you enjoy them?"

"I eat 'em," he said.

"What time do you have tea?" she inquired.

"Four o'clock," said he. "Sharp!"

"But it's a quarter to, now!" she exclaimed, pointing to a clock with
weights at the end of brass chains and a long pendulum. "And didn't you
say your servant was out?"

"Ay," he mysteriously lied. "Her's out. But her'll come back. Happen
her's gone to get a bit o' fish or something."

"Fish! Do you always have fish for tea?"

"I have what I'm given," he replied. "I fancy a snack for my tea.
Something tasty, ye know."

"Why," she said, "you're just like me. I adore tea. I'd sooner have tea
than any other meal of the day. But I never yet knew a servant who
could get something tasty every day. Of course, it's quite easy if you
know how to do it; but servants don't--that is to say, as a rule--but I
expect you've got a very good one."

"So-so!" James murmured.

"The trouble with servants is that they always think that if you like a
thing one day you'll like the same thing every day for the next three
years."

"Ay," he said, drily. "I used to like a kidney, but it's more than three
years ago." He stuck his lips out, and raised himself higher than ever
on his toes.

He did not laugh. But she laughed, almost boisterously.

"I can't help telling you," she said, "you're perfectly lovely,
great-stepuncle. Are we both going to drink out of the same cup?" In
such manner did the current of her talk gyrate and turn corners.

He approached the cupboard.

"No, no!" She sprang up. "Let me. I'll do that, as the servant is so
long."

And she opened the cupboard. Among a miscellany of crocks therein was a
blue-and-white cup and saucer, and a plate to match underneath it, that
seemed out of place there. She lifted down the pile.

"Steady on!" he counselled her. "Why dun you choose that?"

"Because I like it," she replied, simply.

He was silenced. "That's a bit o' real Spode," he said, as she put it on
the table and dusted the several pieces with a corner of the tablecloth.

"It won't be in any danger," she retorted, "until it comes to be washed
up. So I'll stop afterwards and wash it up myself. There!"

"Now you can't find the teaspoons, miss!" he challenged her.

"I think I can," she said.

She raised the tablecloth at the end, discovered the knob of a drawer,
and opened it. And, surely, there were teaspoons.

"Can't I just take a peep into the scullery?" she begged, with a
bewitching supplication. "I won't stop. It's nearly time your servant
was back, if she's always so dreadfully prompt as you say. I won't touch
anything. Servants are so silly. They always think one wants to
interfere with them."

Without waiting for James's permission, she burst youthfully into the
scullery.

"Oh," she exclaimed, "there's some one here!"

Of course there was. There was Mrs. Butt.

Although the part played by Mrs. Butt in the drama was vehement and
momentous, it was nevertheless so brief that a description of Mrs. Butt
is hardly called for. Suffice it to say that she had so much waist as to
have no waist, and that she possessed both a beard and a moustache.
This curt catalogue of her charms is unfair to her; but Mrs. Butt was
ever the victim of unfairness.

James Ollerenshaw looked audaciously in at the door. "It's Mrs. Butt,"
said he. "Us thought as ye were out."

"Good-afternoon, Mrs. Butt," Helen began, with candid pleasantness.

A pause.

"Good-afternoon, miss."

"And what have you got for uncle's tea to-day? Something tasty?"

"I've got this," said Mrs. Butt, with candid unpleasantness. And she
pointed to an oblate spheroid, the colour of brick, but smoother, which
lay on a plate near the gas-stove. It was a kidney.

"H'm!"--from James.

"It's not cooked yet, I see," Helen observed. "And--"

The clock finished her remark.

"No, miss, it's not cooked," said Mrs. Butt. "To tell ye the honest
truth, miss, I've been learning, 'stead o' cooking this 'ere kidney."
She picked up the kidney in her pudding-like hand and gazed at it. "I'm
glad the brasses is clean, miss, at any rate, though the house _does_
look as though there was no woman about the place, and servants _are_
silly. I'm thankful to Heaven as the brasses is clean. Come into my
scullery, and welcome."

She ceased, still holding up the kidney.

"H'm!"--from Uncle James.

This repeated remark of his seemed to rouse the fury in her. "You may
'h'm,' Mester Ollerenshaw," she glared at him. "You may 'h'm' as much as
yo'n a mind." Then to Helen: "Come in, miss; come in. Don't be afraid of
servants." And finally, with a striking instinct for theatrical effect:
"But I go out!"

She flung the innocent and yielding kidney to the floor, snatched up a
bonnet, cast off her apron, and departed.

"There!" said James Ollerenshaw. "You've done it!"




CHAPTER VII

THE NEW COOK


Ten minutes later Mr. James Ollerenshaw stood alone in his
kitchen-sitting-room. And he gazed at the door between the
kitchen-sitting-room and the scullery. This door was shut; that is to
say, it was nearly shut. He had been turned out of the scullery; not
with violence--or, rather, with a sort of sweet violence that he liked,
and that had never before been administered to him by any human soul. An
afternoon highly adventurous--an afternoon on which he had permitted
himself to be insulted, with worse than impunity to the insulter, by the
childish daughter of that chit Susan--an afternoon on which he had
raised his hat to Mrs. Prockter--a Saturday afternoon on which he had
foregone, on account of a woman, his customary match at bowls--this
afternoon was drawing to a close in a manner which piled thrilling event
on thrilling event.

Mrs. Butt had departed. For unnumbered years Mrs. Butt had miscooked his
meals. The little house was almost inconceivable without Mrs. Butt. And
Mrs. Butt had departed. Already he missed her as one misses an ancient
and supersensitive corn--if the simile may be permitted to one; it is a
simile not quite nice, but, then, Mrs. Butt was not quite nice either.
The fault was not hers; she was born so.

The dropping of the kidney with a _plop_, by Mrs. Butt, on the hard,
unsympathetic floor of the scullery, had constituted an extremely
dramatic moment in three lives. Certainly Mrs. Butt possessed a wondrous
instinct for theatrical effect. Helen, on the contrary, seemed to
possess none. She had advanced nonchalantly towards the kidney, and
delicately picked it up between finger and thumb, and turned it over,
and then put it on a plate.

"That's a veal kidney," she had observed.

"Art sure it isn't a sheep's kidney, lass?" James had asked, carefully
imitating Helen's nonchalance.

"Yes," she had said. "I gather you are not passionately fond of kidneys,
great-stepuncle?" she had asked.

"I was once. What art going to do, lass?"

"I'm going to get our tea," she had said.

At the words, _our_ tea, the antique James Ollerenshaw, who had never
thought to have such a sensation again, was most distinctly conscious of
an agreeable, somewhat disturbing sensation of being tickled in the
small of his back.

"Well," he had asked her, "what can I do?"

"You can go out," she had replied. "Wouldn't it be a good thing for you
to go out for a walk? Tea will be ready at half-past four."

"I go for no walk," he said, positively....

"Yes, that's all right," she had murmured, but not in response to his
flat refusal to obey her. She had been opening the double cupboard and
the five drawers which constituted the receptacles of the
scullery-larders; she had been spying out the riches and the poverty of
the establishment. Then she had turned to him, and, instead of engaging
him in battle, she had just smiled at him, and said: "Very well. As you
wish. But do go into the front room, at any rate."

And there he was in the middle room, the kitchen, listening to her
movements behind the door. He heard the running of water, and then the
mild explosion of lighting the second ring of the gas-stove; the first
had been lighted by Mrs. Butt. Then he heard nothing whatever for years,
and when he looked at the clock it was fourteen minutes past four. In
the act of looking at the clock, his eye had to traverse the region of
the sofa. On the sofa were one parasol and two gloves. Astonishing,
singular, disconcerting, how those articles--which, after all, bore no
kind of resemblance to any style of furniture or hangings--seemed,
nevertheless, to refurnish the room, to give the room an air of being
thickly inhabited which it never had before!

Then she burst into the kitchen unexpectedly, with a swish of silk that
was like the retreat of waves down the shingle of some Atlantic shore.

"My dear uncle," she protested, "please do make yourself scarce. You are
in my way, and I'm very busy."

She went to the cupboard and snatched at some plates, two of which she
dropped on the table, and three of which she took into the kitchen.

"Have ye got all as ye want?" he questioned her politely, anxious to be
of assistance.

"Everything!" she answered, positively, and with just the least hint of
an intention to crush him.

"Have ye indeed!"

He did not utter this exclamation aloud; but with it he applied balm to
his secret breast. For he still remembered, being an old man, her
crushing him in the park, and the peril of another crushing roused the
male in him. And it was with a sardonic and cruel satisfaction that he
applied such balm to his secret breast. The truth was, he knew that she
had not got all she wanted. He knew that, despite her extraordinary
capableness (of which she was rather vain), despite her ability to
calculate mentally the interest on eighty-nine pounds for six months at
four-and-a-half per cent., she could not possibly prepare the tea
without coming to him and confessing to him that she had been mistaken,
and that she had _not_ got everything she wanted. She would be compelled
to humble herself before him--were it ever so little. He was a hard old
man, and the prospect of this humbling gave him pleasure (I regret to
say).

You cannot have tea without tea-leaves; and James Ollerenshaw kept the
tea-leaves in a tea-caddy, locked, in his front room. He had an
extravagant taste in tea. He fancied China tea; and he fancied China tea
that cost five shillings a pound. He was the last person to leave China
tea at five shillings a pound to the economic prudence of a Mrs. Butt.
Every day Mrs. Butt brought to him the teapot (warmed) and a teaspoon,
and he unlocked the tea-caddy, dispensed the right quantity of tea, and
relocked the tea-caddy.

There was no other tea in the house. So with a merry heart the callous
fellow (shamefully delighting in the imminent downfall of a
fellow-creature--and that a woman!) went into the front room as he had
been bidden. On one of the family of chairs, in a corner, was a black
octagonal case. He opened this case, which was not locked, and drew from
it a concertina, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Then he went to the
desk, and from under a pile of rent books he extracted several pieces
of music, and selected one. This selected piece he reared up on the
mantelpiece against two brass candlesticks. It was obvious, from the
certainty and ease of his movements, that he had the habit of lodging
pieces of music against those two brass candlesticks. The music bore the
illustrious name of George Frederick Handel.

Then he put on a pair of spectacles which were lying on the mantelpiece,
and balanced them on the end of his nose. Finally he adjusted his little
hands to the straps of the concertina. You might imagine that he would
instantly dissolve into melody. Not at all. He glanced at the page of
music first through his spectacles, and then, bending forward his head,
_over_ his spectacles. Then he put down the concertina, gingerly, on a
chair, and moved the music half-an-inch (perhaps five-eighths) to the
left. He resumed the concertina, and was on the very point of song, when
he put down the concertina for the second time, and moved the tassel of
his Turkish cap from the neighbourhood of his left ear to the
neighbourhood of his right ear. Then, with a cough, he resumed the
concertina once more, and embarked upon the interpretation of Handel.

It was the Hallelujah Chorus.

Any surprise which the musical reader may feel on hearing that James
Ollerenshaw was equal to performing the Hallelujah Chorus on a
concertina (even one inlaid with mother-of-pearl) argues on the part of
that reader an imperfect acquaintance with the Five Towns. In the Five
Towns there are (among piano scorners) two musical instruments, the
concertina and the cornet. And the Five Towns would like to see the
composer clever enough to compose a piece of music that cannot be
arranged for either of these instruments. It is conceivable that
Beethoven imagined, when he wrote the last movement of the C Minor
Symphony, that he had produced a work which it would be impossible to
arrange for cornet solo. But if he did he imagined a vain thing. In the
Five Towns, where the taste for classical music is highly developed, the
C Minor Symphony on a single cornet is as common as "Robin Adair" on a
full brass band.

James Ollerenshaw played the Hallelujah Chorus with much feeling and
expression. He understood the Hallelujah Chorus to its profoundest
depths; which was not surprising in view of the fact that he had been
playing it regularly since before Helen was born. (The unfading charm of
classical music is that you never tire of it.)

Nevertheless, the grandeur of his interpretation of the Hallelujah
Chorus appeared to produce no effect whatever in the scullery; neither
alarm nor ecstasy! And presently, in the midst of a brief pianissimo
passage, James's sensitive ear caught the distant sound of chopping,
which quite marred the soft tenderness at which he had been aiming. He
stopped abruptly. The sound of chopping intrigued his curiosity. What
could she be chopping? He advanced cautiously to the doorway; he had
left the door open. The other door--between the kitchen and the
scullery--which had previously been closed, was now open, so that he
could see from the front room into the scullery. His eager, inquisitive
glance noted a plate of beautiful bread and butter on the tea-table in
the kitchen.

She was chopping the kidney. Utterly absorbed in her task, she had no
suspicion that she was being overlooked. After the chopping of the
kidney, James witnessed a series of operations the key to whose
significance he could not find.

She put a flat pan over the gas, and then took it off again. Then she
picked up an egg, broke it into a coffee-cup, and instantly poured it
out of the coffee-cup into a basin. She did the same to another egg, and
yet another. Four eggs! The entire household stock of eggs! It was
terrible! Four eggs and a kidney among two people! He could not divine
what she was at.

Then she got some butter on the end of a knife and dropped it into the
saucepan, and put the saucepan over the gas; and then poured the
plateful of kidney-shreds into the saucepan. Then she began furiously
to beat the four eggs with a fork, glancing into the saucepan
frequently, and coaxing it with little touches. Then the kidney-shreds
raised a sound of frizzling, and bang into the saucepan went the
contents of the basin. All the time she had held her hands and her
implements and utensils away from her as much as possible, doubtless out
of consideration for her frock; not an inch of apron was she wearing.
Now she leant over the gas-stove, fork in hand, and made baffling
motions inside the saucepan with the fork; and while doing so she
stretched forth her left hand, obtained some salt, and sprinkled the
saucepan therewith. The business seemed to be exquisitely delicate and
breathless. Her face was sternly set, as though the fate of continents
depended on her nerve and audacity in this tremendous crisis. But what
she was doing to the interior of the saucepan James Ollerenshaw could
not comprehend. She stroked it with a long gesture; she tickled it, she
stroked it in a different direction; she lifted it and folded it on
itself.

Anyhow, he knew it was not scrambled eggs, because you have to stir
scrambled eggs without ceasing.

Then she stopped and stood quite still, regarding the saucepan.

"You've watched me quite long enough," she said, without moving her
head. She must have known all the time that he was there.

So he shuffled away, and glanced out of the window at the stir and
traffic of Trafalgar-road.

"Tea's ready," she said.

He went into the kitchen, smiling, enchanted, but disturbed. She had not
come to him and confessed that she could not make tea without
tea-leaves. Yet there was the teapot steaming and puffing on the table!




CHAPTER VIII

OMELETTE


The mystery lay on a plate in the middle of the table. In colour it
resembled scrambled eggs, except that it was tinted a more brownish, or
coppery, gold--rather like a first-class Yorkshire pudding. He suspected
for an instant that it might be a Yorkshire pudding according to the
new-fangled recipe of Board Schools. But four eggs! No! He was sure that
so small a quantity of Yorkshire pudding could not possibly have
required four eggs.

He picked up the teapot, after his manner, and was in the act of
pouring, when she struck him into immobility with a loud cry:

"Milk first!"

He understood that she had a caprice for pouring the tea on the top of
the milk instead of the milk on the top of the tea.

"What difference does it make?" he demanded defiantly.

"What!" she cried again. "You think yourself a great authority on China
tea, and yet you don't know that milk ought to be poured in first! Why,
it makes quite a different taste!"

How in the name of Confucius did she know that he thought himself a
great authority on China tea?

"Here!" she said. "If you don't mind, I'll pour out the tea. Thank you.
Help yourself to this." She pointed to the mystery. "It must be eaten
while it's hot, or it's worse than useless."

"What is it?" he asked, with false calm.

"It's a kidney omelette," she replied.

"Omelette!" he repeated, rather at a loss. He had never tasted an
omelette; he had never seen an omelette. Omelettes form no part of the
domestic cuisine of England. "Omelette!" he repeated. How was he
familiar with the word--the word which conveyed nothing to his mind?
Then he remembered: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."
Of course she had broken eggs. She had broken four eggs--she had broken
the entire household stock of eggs. And he had employed that proverb
scores, hundreds of times! It was one of half-a-dozen favourite proverbs
which he flung at the less sagacious and prudent of his tenants. And yet
it had never occurred to him to wonder what an omelette was! Now he
knew. At any rate, he knew what it looked like; and he was shortly to
know what it tasted like.

"Yes," she said. "Cut it with a knife. Don't be frightened of it.
You'll eat _it_; it won't eat you. And please give me very little. I ate
a quarter of a pound of chocolates after dinner."

He conveyed one-third of the confection to his plate, and about a sixth
to hers.

And he tasted--just a morsel, with a dash of kidney in the centre of it,
on the end of his fork. He was not aware of the fact, but that was the
decisive moment of his life--sixty though he was!

Had she really made this marvel, this dream, this idyll, this
indescribable bliss, out of four common fresh eggs and a veal kidney
that Mrs. Butt had dropped on the floor? He had come to loathe kidney.
He had almost come to swearing that no manifestation or incarnation of
kidney should ever again pass between his excellent teeth. And now he
was ravished, rapt away on the wings of paradisaical ecstasy by a
something that consisted of kidney and a few eggs. This omelette had all
the finer and nobler qualities of Yorkshire pudding and scrambled eggs
combined, together with others beyond the ken of his greedy fancy. Yes,
he was a greedy man. He knew he was greedy. He was a greedy man whose
evil passion had providentially been kept in check for over a quarter of
a century by the gross unskilfulness, the appalling monotony, of a Mrs.
Butt. Could it be that there existed women, light and light-handed
creatures, creatures of originality and resource, who were capable of
producing prodigies like this kidney omelette on the spur of the moment?
Evidently! Helen existed. And the whole omelette, from the melting of
the butter to the final steady glance into the saucepan, had not
occupied her more than six minutes--at most. She had tossed it off as he
might have tossed off a receipt for a week's rent. And the exquisite
thought in his mind, the thought of penetrating sweetness, was that
whence this delicacy had come, other and even rarer delicacies might
have come. All his past life seemed to him to be a miserable waste of
gloomy and joyless years.

"Do you like it?" she inquired.

He paused, as though reflecting whether he liked it or not. "Ay," he
said, judicially, "it's none so bad. I could do a bit more o' that."

"Well," she urged him, "do help yourself. Take it all. I shan't eat any
more."

"Sure?" he said, trembling lest she might change her mind.

Then he ate the remaining half of the omelette, making five-sixths in
all. He glanced at her surreptitiously, in her fine dress, on which was
not a single splash or stain. He might have known that so extraordinary
and exotic a female person would not concoct anything so trite as a
Yorkshire pudding or scrambled eggs.

Not till the omelette was an affair of the past (so far as _his_ plate
was concerned) did he begin to attend to his tea--his tea which
sustained a mystery as curious as, and decidedly more sinister than, the
mystery of the omelette.

He stared into the cup; then, to use the Five Towns phrase, he supped it
up.

There could be no doubt; it was his special China tea. It had a peculiar
flavour (owing, perhaps, to the precedence given to milk), but it was
incontestably his guarded and locked tea. How had she got it?

"Where didst find this tea, lass?" he asked.

"In the little corner cupboard in the scullery," she said. "I'd no idea
that people drank such good China tea in Bursley."

"Ah!" he observed, concealing his concern under a mask of irony, "China
tea was drunk i' Bursley afore your time."

"Mother would only drink Ceylon," said she.

"That doesna' surprise me," said he, as if to imply that no vagary on
the part of Susan could surprise him. And he proceeded, reflectively:
"In th' corner cupboard, sayst tha?"

"Yes, in a large tin box."

A large tin box. This news was overwhelming. He rose abruptly and went
into the scullery. Indubitably there was a large tin box, pretty nearly
half full of his guarded tea, in the corner cupboard.

He returned, the illusion of half a lifetime shattered. "That there
woman was a thief!" he announced.

"What woman?"

"Mrs. Butt."

And he explained to Helen all his elaborate precautions for the
preservation of his China tea. Helen was wholly sympathetic. The utter
correctness of her attitude towards Mrs. Butt was balm to him. Only one
theory was conceivable. The wretched woman must have had a key to his
caddy. During his absence from the house she must have calmly helped
herself to tea at five shillings a pound--a spoonful or so at a time.
Doubtless she made tea for her private consumption exactly when she
chose. It was even possible that she walked off from time to time with
quantities of tea to her own home. And he who thought himself so clever,
so much cleverer than a servant!

"You can't have her back, as she isn't honest, even if she comes back,"
said Helen.

"Oh, her won't come back," said James. "Fact is, I've had difficulties
with her for a long time now."

"Then what shall you do, my poor dear uncle?"

"Nay," said he, "I mun ask you that. It was you as was th' cause of her
going."

"Oh, uncle!" she exclaimed, laughing. "How can you say such a thing?"
And she added, seriously: "You can't be expected to cook for yourself,
can you? And as for getting a new one--"

He noticed with satisfaction that she had taken to calling him simply
uncle, instead of great-stepuncle.

"A new 'un!" he muttered, grimly, and sighed in despair.

"I shall stay and look after your supper," she said, brightly.

"Yes, and what about to-morrow?" He grew gloomier.

"To-morrow's Sunday. I'll come to-morrow, for breakfast."

"Yes, and what about Monday?" His gloom was not easily to be dispersed.

"I'll come on Monday," she replied, with increasing cheerfulness.

"But your school, where ye teach everything, lass?"

"Of course, I shall give up school," said she, "at once. They must do
without me. It will mean promotion for some one. I can't bother about
giving proper notice. Supposing you had been dangerously ill, I should
have come, and they would have managed without me. Therefore, they _can_
manage without me. Therefore, they must."

He kept up a magnificent gloom until she left for the night. And then he
danced a hornpipe of glee--not with his legs, but in his heart. He had
deliberately schemed to get rid of Mrs. Butt by means of Helen Rathbone.
The idea had occurred to him as he entered the house. That was why he