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.”