ed at each other interrogatively, disturbed,
alarmed, shocked.

'Can she have been listening at doors?' Aunt Annie inquired in a
whisper.

Wherever the sisters happened to be, they never discussed Sarah save in
a whisper. If they had been in Alaska and Sarah in Timbuctoo, they would
have mentioned her name in a whisper, lest she might overhear. And, by
the way, Sarah's name was not Sarah, but Susan. It had been altered in
deference to a general opinion that it was not nice for a servant to
bear the same name as her mistress, and, further, that such an anomaly
had a tendency to subvert the social order.

'I don't know,' said Mrs. Knight 'I put her straight about those lumps
of sugar.'

'Did you tell her to see to the hot-water bottle?'

'Bless us, no!'

Aunt Annie rang the bell.

'Sarah, put a hot-water bottle in your master's bed. And be sure the
stopper is quite tight.'

'Yes'm. Master's just coming down the street now, mum.'

Sarah spoke true. The master was in fact coming down the wintry gaslit
street. And the street was Dawes Road, Fulham, in the day of its
newness. The master stopped at the gate of a house of two storeys with a
cellar-kitchen. He pushed open the creaking iron device and entered the
garden, sixteen foot by four, which was the symbol of the park in which
the house would have stood if it had been a mansion. In a stride he
walked from one end to the other of the path, which would have been a
tree-lined, winding carriage-drive had the garden been a park. As he
fumbled for his latchkey, he could see the beaming face of the
representative of the respectful lower classes in the cellar-kitchen.
The door yielded before him as before its rightful lord, and he passed
into his sacred domestic privacy with an air which plainly asserted:
'Here I am king, absolute, beneficent, worshipped.'

'Come to the fire, quick, Henry,' said Aunt Annie, fussing round him
actively.

It would be idle to attempt to conceal, even for a moment, that this was
not Henry the elder, but Henry Shakspere, aged twenty-three, with a face
made grave, perhaps prematurely, by the double responsibilities of a
householder and a man of affairs. Henry had lost some of his boyish
plumpness, and he had that night a short, dry cough.

'I'm coming,' he replied curtly, taking off his blue Melton. 'Don't
worry.'

And in a fraction of a second, not only Aunt Annie, but his mother in
the dining-room and his helot in the cellar-kitchen,