ear my own table and wash my own silver and china.
Dorothy is old and has the rheumatism in her feet, and I must help; so,
Mr. Aristocrat, if you do not wish to see me degrade myself, just go and
take a walk, and when you come back the obnoxious apron shall be laid
aside and we will practice that song you brought me."

Neil did not go out and walk, but staid in the dining-room and smoked
his cigar, and looked at Bessie as she cleared away the breakfast dishes
and washed the silver and china, with her sleeves drawn half-way to her
elbows, showing her round, white arms.

"Yes, she is just suited to America, where, I believe, the women all
wear aprons and wash their own dishes," Neil thought, as he watched her
with a strange feeling in his heart of pain and happiness; happiness
that for a few days at least she was his to look at, to love, to caress;
pain that the days were so few and so short when he must leave her.

And then there arose before him, as in a vision, a picture of a quiet
home amid green hedge-rows and sunny lanes, not a home such as Blanche's
would be, with gorgeous surroundings and liveried servants everywhere,
but such a home as makes a man better for living in it; a home where the
housewifely Bessie was the presiding goddess, flitting about just as she
was doing now, putting away the silver and china, brushing up the
hearth, moving a chair here and another there, watering her pots of
flowers in the conservatory, tea-roses and carnations and heliotrope and
lilies all in bloom and filling the room with sweet perfume as if it
were the summer-time, instead of chill December with its biting blasts
sweeping against the windows.

"There!" Bessie said, at last, removing her apron, pulling down her
sleeves, and smoothing her bright wavy hair, "I have dismissed the
housemaid, and now I am ready to sing for you, or play chess, or do
whatever you like."

But Neil was in no mood for singing or playing chess, or even talking
much, and his fit of abstraction lasted all day, or until late in the
afternoon, when Bessie began to speak of getting herself in readiness
for Grey, who was to come in the evening train from Carnarvon. Then Neil
roused, and as if he had nerved himself for the sacrifice, manifested a
great deal of interest with regard to Bessie's personal appearance.

"I want you to get yourself up stunningly," he said, "so as to make a
good first appearance. I have told Grey so much about you that he must
no