that she forgot all about Hilton, who had been
driven ignominiously to the back door and was left sitting in the
kitchen till the two servants should have time to take her upstairs, and
was employing the time composing a speech of a spirited nature in which
she intended giving her mistress notice the moment she saw her again.

Her mistress meanwhile was meditatively turning over the vanilla balls
in her soup. "Well, I don't like it," she said at last, laying down her
spoon.

"Oh, it's ripping!" cried her daughter ecstatically. "It's like having
one's pudding at the other end."

"How can you look at chocolate after Berlin, greedy girl?" asked her
mother, disgusted by her child's obvious tendency towards a too free
indulgence in the pleasures of the table. But Letty was feeling so
jovial that in the face of this question she boldly asked for more--a
request that was refused indignantly and at once.

There was such a long pause after the soup that in their hunger they
began to eat the stewed apples and bottled cherries that were on the
table. The brown bread, arranged in thin slices on a white crochet mat
in a japanned dish, felt so damp and was so full of caraway seeds that
it was uneatable. After a while some roach, caught on the estate, and
with a strong muddy flavour and bewildering multitudes of bones, was
brought in; and after that came cutlets from Anna's pigs; and after that
a queer red gelatinous pudding that tasted of physic; and after that,
the meal being evidently at an end, Susie, who was very hungry, remarked
that if all the food were going to be like those specimens they had
better return at once to England, or they would certainly be starved.
"It's a good thing you are not going to stay here, Anna," she said, "for
you'd have to make a tremendous fuss before you'd get them to leave off
treating you like a pig. Look here--teaspoons to eat the pudding with,
and the same fork all the way through. It's a beastly hole"--Letty's
eyebrows telegraphed triumphantly across to Miss Leech, "Well, did you
hear that?"--"and we ought to have stayed in Berlin. There was nothing
to be gained at all by coming here."

"Perhaps the dinner to-night will be better," said Anna, trying to
comfort her, and little knowing that they had just eaten the dinner; but
people who are hungry are surprisingly impervious to the influence of
fair words. "It couldn't be worse, anyhow, so it really will probably be
better. I'm very glad thou