The surveyors manifested some curiosity.  “What do you know about a young lady?” they asked.

“The young lady of the house,” replied Harkness.  “Hasn’t he"—­referring to Bates—­“told you all about her?  The domestic divinity who has just happened to get mislaid this morning.  I saw him looking over the wood pile to see if she had fallen behind it, but she hadn’t.”

“It is only a few days since her father died,” said the senior of the party gravely.

“And so,” went on the young man, “she has very properly given these few days to inconsolable grief.  But now our visit is just timed to comfort and enliven her, why is she not here to be comforted and enlivened?”

No-one answered, and, as the speaker was slowly making his way toward the frying-pan, no one seemed really apprehensive that he would keep them waiting.  The youth had an oval, almost childish face; his skin was dark, clear, and softly coloured as any girl’s; his hair fell in black, loose curls over his forehead.  He was tall, slender without being thin, very supple; but his languid attitudes fell short of grace, and were only tolerable because they were comic.  When he reached out his hand for the handle of the frying-pan he held the attention of the whole company by virtue of his office, and his mind, to Bates’s annoyance, was still running on the girl.

“Is she fond of going out walking alone?” he asked.

“How could she be fond of walking when there’s no place to walk?” Bates spoke roughly.  “Besides, she has too much work to do.”

“Ever lost her before?”

“No,” said Bates.  It would have been perfectly unbearable to his pride that these strangers should guess his real uneasiness or its cause, so he talked as if the fact of the girl’s long absence was not in any way remarkable.

Having mixed a batter the American sliced pork fat into the hot pan and was instantly obscured from view by the smoke thereof.  In a minute his face appeared above it like the face of a genius.

“You will observe, gentlemen,” he cried without bashfulness, “that I now perform the eminently interesting operation of dropping cakes—­one, two, three.  May the intelligent young lady return to eat them!”

No one laughed, but his companions smiled patiently at his antics—­a patience born of sitting in a very hot, steamy room after weeks in the open air.

“You are a cook,” remarked Bates.

The youth bent his long body towards him at a sudden angle.  “Born a cook—­dentist by profession—­by choice a vagabond.”

“Dentist?” said Bates curiously.

“At your service, sir.”

“He is really a dentist,” said one of the surveyors with sleepy amusement.  “He carries his forceps round in his vest pocket.”

“I lost them when I scrambled head first down this gentleman’s macadamised road this morning, but if you want a tooth out I can use the tongs.”