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?