“Yes, occupied in dishing up the dinner,” Julia said, “which is just the best of all times for you to have come.  Johnny!” she called; “Johnny, Joost is here.”

Mr. Gillat, who had been carefully placing the dish where the cinders would fall into it, came to the door.

“This is Mr. Gillat, a very old friend of mine,” Julia explained, and Joost bowed deeply, offering his hand and saying, “I hope that you are well, sir.”

Whereupon Mr. Gillat impressed, imitated him as nearly as he could, and Julia looked away.

They had dinner in the kitchen on Sundays as well as week days, they made no difference to-day.  Joost looked round him once or twice; he had never seen a place like this.  It was the front kitchen; the cooking and most of the house-work was done in the back one, a big barn-like place with doors in all corners.  The front one was half a kitchen and half a sitting-room, warm-coloured, with red-tiled floor and low ceiling, heavily cross-beamed and hung with herbs and a couple of hams, in great contrast to the whiteness of the kitchen at the bulb farm.  There were brass and copper pots and pans such as he knew, but they reflected an open fire, a dirty extravagance unknown to Mevrouw.  Joost glanced at the fire, and it is to be feared that he was at heart a traitor to his native customs.  Then he looked at the open window where the sunshine streamed in—­as was never permitted in Holland—­and he wondered if it really spoilt things very much, and, being a florist, thought it certainly would spoil the tulips in the mug that stood on the wide sill.

During dinner they spoke English for the sake of the Captain and Mr. Gillat; Joost spoke well, if slowly, with a careful and accurate precision.  He also observed much, both of outside things, as the fact that Johnny and the Captain cleared the table while Julia sat still, contrary to Dutch custom.  And also of things less on the surface—­as that Julia was head of the household and that Captain Polkington was not the impressive and authoritative person Mijnheer seemed to think.  Concerning this last fact he made no remark when, on his return home, he described the ways and customs of Julia’s cottage to his parents.  The description served Mevrouw at least, as representative of all English households ever afterwards.

When dinner was done and everything cleared up, or rather Julia’s part, she took Joost into the garden.

“Now,” she said in Dutch, “let us come out and talk and look at things.”

They went out and he began to admire her orderly garden and to tell her why this plant had done well and that one had failed.  He did not speak of the blue daffodil, he thought he could better ask about that a little later.  She did not speak of it either by name; he and it were so inseparably connected in her mind.

“Come along,” she said, when he stopped to look into a tulip to see if its centre was as truly black as it should have been.  “Come and see it.”