She found things running very smoothly downstairs, there seemed to be not even the tiniest flaw for a critical mistress to detect, and the children had added a bewildering number of new names to their lists of favorite dishes.  Justine was asked over and over again for her Manila curry, her beef and kidney pie, her scones and German fruit tarts, and for a brown and crisp and savory dish in which the mistress of the house recognized, under the title of chou farci, an ordinary cabbage as a foundation.

“Oh, let’s not have just chickens or beef,” Sandy would plead when a company dinner was under discussion.  “Let’s have one of Justine’s fussy dishes.  Leave it to Justine!”

For the Treasure obviously enjoyed company dinner parties, and it was fascinating to Sandy to see how methodically, and with what delightful leisure, she prepared for them.  Two or three days beforehand her cake-making, silver-polishing, sweeping and cleaning were well under way, and the day of the event itself was no busier than any other day.

Yet it was on one of these occasions that Mrs. Salisbury first had what she felt was good reason to criticize Justine.  During a brief absence from home of both boys, their mother planned a rather formal dinner.  Four of her closest friends, two couples, were asked, and Owen Sargent was invited by Sandy to make the group an even eight.  This was as many as the family table accommodated comfortably, and seemed quite an event.  Ordinarily the mistress of the house would have been fussing for some days beforehand, in her anxiety to have everything go well, but now, with Justine’s brain and Justine’s hands in command of the kitchen end of affairs, she went to the other extreme, and did not give her own and Sandy’s share of the preparations a thought until the actual day of the dinner.

For, as was stipulated in her bond, except for a general cleaning once a week, the Treasure did no work downstairs outside of the dining-room and kitchen, and made no beds at any time.  This meant that the daughter of the house must spend at least an hour every morning in bed-making, and perhaps another fifteen minutes in that mysteriously absorbing business known as “straightening” the living room.  Usually Sandy was very faithful to these duties; more, she whisked through them cheerfully, in her enthusiastic eagerness that the new domestic experiment should prove a success.

But for a morning or two before this particular dinner she had shirked her work.  Perhaps the novelty of it was wearing off a little.  There was a tennis tournament in progress at the Burning Woods Country Club, two miles away from River Falls, and Sandy, who was rather proud of her membership in this very smart organization, did not want to miss a moment of it.  Breakfast was barely over before somebody’s car was at the door to pick up Miss Salisbury, who departed in a whirl of laughter and a flutter of bright veils, to be gone, sometimes, for the entire day.