Little Miss Bunting flushed delightedly, and from that moment onward became one of the new boarder’s most devoted adherents.

“You’d like some tea, I expect,” she said presently.  “Will you have it up here—­or in the dining-room with the other boarders in half an hour’s time?”

“Oh, up here, please.  I can’t possibly wait half an hour.”

“I ought to tell you,” Miss Bunting continued, dimpling a little, “that it will be sixpence extra if you have it up here. ’All meals served in rooms, sixpence extra,’” she read out, pointing to the printed list of rules and regulations hanging prominently above the chimney-piece.

Diana regarded it with amusement.

“They ought to be written on tablets of stone like the Ten Commandments,” she commented frivolously.  “It rather reminds me of being at school again.  I’ve never lived in a boarding-house before, you know; I had rooms in the house of an old servant of ours.  Well, here goes!”—­twisting the framed set of rules round with its face to the wall.  “Now, if I break the laws of the Medes and Persians I can’t be blamed, because I haven’t read them.”

Miss Bunting privately thought that the new boarder, recommended by so great a personage as Signor Baroni, stood an excellent chance of being allowed a generous latitude as regards conforming to the rules at No. 24—­provided she paid her bills promptly and without too careful a scrutiny of the “extras.”  Bunty, indeed, retained few illusions concerning her employer, and perhaps this was just as well—­for the fewer the illusions by which you’re handicapped, the fewer your disappointments before the journey’s end.

“You haven’t told me your name,” said Diana, when the lady-help reappeared with a small tea-tray in her hand.

“Bunting,” came the smiling reply.  “But most of the boarders call me Bunty.”

“I shall, too, may I?—­And oh, why haven’t you brought two cups?  I wanted you to have tea with me—­if you’ve time, that is?”

“If I had brought a second cup, ‘Tea, for two’ would have been charged to your account,” observed Miss Bunting.

“What?” Diana’s eyes grew round with astonishment.  “With the same sized teapot?”

The other nodded humorously.

“Well, Mrs. Lawrence’s logic is beyond me,” pursued Diana.  “However, we’ll obviate the difficulty.  I’ll have tea out of my tooth-glass”—­glancing towards the washstand in the adjoining room where that article, inverted, capped the water-bottle—­“and you, being the honoured guest, shall luxuriate in the cup.”

Bunty modestly protested, but Diana had her own way in the matter, and when finally the little lady-help went downstairs to pour out tea in the dining-room for the rest of the boarders, it was with that pleasantly warm glow about the region of the heart which the experience of an unexpected kindness is prone to produce.

Meanwhile Diana busied herself unpacking her clothes and putting them away in the rather limited cupboard accommodation provided, and in fixing up a few pictures, recklessly hammering the requisite nails into the walls in happy disregard of Rule III of the printed list, which emphatically stated that:  “No nails must be driven into the walls without permission.”