“The tail is still on,” she whispered, not too cheerfully, but as one who in darkness sees light beyond.

The cow’s tail was painted in blue upon its side.

“When I bought it,” said Regie, in a strangled voice, “and it was a great-deal-of-money cow, I did wish its tail had been out behind; but I think now it is safer like that.”

“All the best cows have their tails on the side,” said Hester.  “And to-morrow morning, when you are dressed, run up to my room, and you will find it just like it was before.”  And she carefully put aside the bits with the injured animal.

“And now what has Stella got?”

Stella produced a bag of “bull’s-eyes,” which, in striking contrast with the cow, had, in the course of the drive home, cohered so tightly together that it was doubtful if they would ever be separated again.

“Fraeulein never eats bull’s-eyes,” said Mary, who was what her parents called “a very truthful child.”

“I eats them,” said Stella, reversing her small cauliflower-like person on the sofa till only a circle of white rims with a nucleus of coventry frilling, with two pink legs kicking gently upward, were visible.

Stella always turned upsidedown if the conversation took a personal turn.  In later and more conventional years we find a poor equivalent for marking our disapproval by changing the subject.

Hester had hardly set Stella right side upward when the door opened once more and Mrs. Gresley entered, hot and exhausted.

“Run up-stairs, my pets,” she said.  “Hester, you should not keep them down here now.  It is past their tea-time.”

“We came ourselves, mother,” said Regie.  “Fruaelein said we might, to show Auntie Hester our secrets.”

“Well, never mind; run away now,” said the poor mother, sitting down heavily in a low chair, “and take Boulou.”

“You are tired out,” said Hester, slipping on to her knees and unlacing her sister-in-law’s brown boots.

Mrs. Gresley looked with a shade of compunction at the fragile kneeling figure, with its face crimsoned by the act of stooping and by the obduracy of the dust-ingrained boot-laces.  But as she looked she noticed the flushed cheeks, and, being a diviner of spirits, wondered what Hester was ashamed of now.

As Hester rose her sister-in-law held out, with momentary hesitation, a thin paper bag, in which an oval form allowed its moist presence to be discerned by partial adhesion to its envelope.

“I saw you ate no luncheon, Hester, so I have brought you a little sole for supper.”

Some of us poor Marthas spend all our existence, so to speak, in the kitchens of life.  We never get so far as the drawing-room.  Our conquests, our self-denials, are achieved through the medium of suet and lard and necks of mutton.  We wrestle with the dripping, and rise on stepping-stones—­not of our dead selves, but of sheep and oxen—­to higher things.