“Ring the bell, dear,” said Carroll.

“You don’t mind, Arthur, do you?” Mrs. Carroll asked, with a confident look at him.

Carroll smiled.  “No, darling, only I hope none of you are really going hungry.”

They all laughed at him.  “Soup and pudding are all one ought to eat in such hot weather,” Charlotte said, conclusively.

She even jumped up, ran to her father, and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, to reassure him.  “You darling papa,” she whispered in his ear, and when he looked at her tears shone in her beautiful eyes.

Carroll’s own face turned strangely sober for a second, then he laughed.  “Run back to your seat and get your pudding, sweetheart,” he said, with a loving push, as the maid entered.

People thought it rather singular that the Carrolls should have but one maid, but there were reasons.  Carroll himself, when he first organized his Banbridge establishment, had expressed some dissent as to the solitary servant.

“Why not have more?” he asked, but Anna Carroll was unusually decided in her response.

“Amy and I have been talking it over, Arthur,” said she, “and we have decided that we would prefer only Marie.”

“Why, Anna?” Carroll had asked, with a frown.

“Now, Arthur, dear, don’t look cross,” his wife had cried.  “It is only that when the truce is over with the butcher and baker—­and after a while the truce always is over, you know, you poor, dear boy, ever since you—­ever since you were so badly treated about your business, you know, and when the butcher and the baker turn on us, Anna and I have decided it would be better not to have a trust in the kitchen.  You know there has always been a trust in the kitchen, and two or even three maids saying they will not make bread and roast and wash the dishes, and having a council of war on the back stoop with the baker and grocer, are so much worse than one maid, don’t you know, precious?”

“The long and the short of it is, Arthur,” Anna Carroll said, quite bluntly, “it is much less wearing to get on with one maid who has not had her wages, and much easier to induce her to remain or forfeit all hope of ever receiving them, than with more than one.”

Only the one maid was engaged, and now Anna’s prophecy had come to pass, and she was remaining for the sake of her unpaid wages.  She was a young girl, and pretty for one of her sisterhood, who perpetuate, as a rule, the hard and strenuous lineaments and forms held to hard labor, until they have attained a squat solidity of ungraceful muscle.  This little Hungarian Marie was still not overdeveloped muscularly, although one saw her hands with a certain shock after her little, smiling face, which still smiled, despite her wrongs.  Nothing could exceed the sweetness of the girl’s disposition, although she came of a fierce peasant line, quick to resort to the knife as a redresser of injuries, and quick to perceive injuries.