This bath had been put in lately, and was at once the pride and the terror of the servants.  It was very patent.  Nobody quite understood it.  There were long printed instructions as to its right treatment hanging on the wall, in which the work pericoloso recurred.  When Mrs. Fisher, proceeding on her arrival to the bathroom, saw this word, she went back to her room again and ordered a sponge-bath instead; and when the other found what using the bathroom meant, and how reluctant the servants were to leave them alone with the stove, and how Francesca positively refused to, and stayed with her back turned watching the tap, and how the remaining servants waited anxiously outside the door till the bather came safely out again, they too had sponge-baths brought into their rooms instead.

Mr. Wilkins, however, was a man, and would be sure to want a big bath.  Having it, Scrap calculated, would keep him busy for a long while.  Then he would unpack, and then, after his night in the train, he would probably sleep till the evening.  So would he be provided for the whole of that day, and not be let loose on them till dinner.

Therefore Scrap came to the conclusion she would be quite safe in the garden that day, and got up as usual after breakfast, and dawdled as usual through her dressing, listening with a slight cocked ear to the sounds of Mr. Wilkins’s arrival, of his luggage being carried into Lotty’s room on the other side of the landing, of his educated voice as he inquired of Lotty, first, “Do I give this fellow anything?” and immediately afterwards, “Can I have a hot bath?”—­of Lotty’s voice cheerfully assuring him that he needn’t give the fellow anything because he was the gardener, and that yes, he could have a hot bath; and soon after this the landing was filled with the familiar noises of wood being brought, of water being brought, of feet running, of tongues vociferating—–­in fact, with the preparation of the bath.

Scrap finished dressing, and then loitered at her window, waiting till she should here Mr. Wilkins go into the bathroom.  When he was safely there she would slip out and settle herself in her garden and resume her inquiries into the probable meaning of her life.  She was getting on with her inquiries.  She dozed much less frequently, and was beginning to be inclined to agree that tawdry was the word to apply to her past.  Also she was afraid that her future looked black.

There—­she could hear Mr. Wilkins’s educated voice again.  Lotty’s door had opened, and he was coming out of it asking his way to the bathroom.

“It’s where you see the crowd,” Lotty’s voice answered—­still a cheerful voice, Scrap was glad to notice.

His steps went along the landing, and Lotty’s steps seemed to go downstairs, and then there seemed to be a brief altercation at the bathroom door—­hardly so much an altercation as a chorus of vociferations on one side and wordless determination, Scrap judged, to have a bath by oneself on the other.