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!”