“The past is often enveloped.  In the best families it is notoriously so.  We know what we are, an’ may speckilate on what we was; but what we’re to be, who can possibly tell?  It might give us the creeps.”

She said again:  “Every man carries a button in his knapsack, by which he may rise sooner or later to higher things.  It was said by a Frenchman, and a politer nation you would not find.”

Again:  “Blood will tell, always supposin’ you ’ave it, and will excuse the expression.”

Thus did Mrs Bowldler “turn her necessity to glorious gain,” colouring and enlarging her sphere of service under the prismatic lens of romance.  In her conversation either cottage became a “residence,” and its small garden “the grounds,” thus:—­

“Palmerston, inform Captain Hunken that dinner is served.  You will find him in the grounds.”

Or, “Where’s that boy?” Captain Cai might ask.

“Palmerston, sir?  He is at present in the adjacent, cleaning the knives and forks.”

She had indeed set this high standard of expression in the very act of taking service; when, being asked what wages she demanded, she answered, “If acceptable to you, sir, I would intimate eighteen guineas—­and my viands.”

“That’s two shilling short o’ nineteen pound,” said Captain Hunken.

“I thank you, sir”—­Mrs Bowldler made obeisance—­“but I have an attachment to guineas.”

She identified herself with her employers by speaking of them in the first person plural:  “No, we do not dress for dinner.  Our rule is to dine in the middle of the day, as more agreeable to health.” [A sigh.] “Sometimes I wish we could persuade ourselves that vegetables look better on the side-table.”

Such was Mrs Bowldler:  and her housekeeping, no less vigilant than romantic, protected our two friends from a thousand small domestic cares.

“Committee-meeting, to-night?” asked ’Bias.

“Eight o’clock:  to settle up details—­mark-boats, handicap, and the like. . . .  It’s a wonder to me,” said Cai reflectively, “how this regatta has run on, year after year.  With Bussa for secretary, if you can understand such madness.”

“They’ll be runnin’ you for the next Parish Council, sure as fate.”

Cai ignored this.  “There’s the fireworks, too.  Nobody chosen yet to superintend ’em, an’ who’s to do it I don’t know, unless I take over that little job in addition.”

“I thought the firm always sent a couple o’ hands to fix an let ’em off.”

“So it does.  They arrived a couple of hours ago—­both drunk as Chloe.”

“Plenty o’ time to sleep it off between this an’ then,” opined ’Bias comfortably.

“But they’re still on the drink.  Likely as not we shall find ’em to-morrow in Highway lock-up, which is four miles from here. . . .  It happened once before,” said Cai with a face of gloom, “and Bussa did the whole display by himself.”