of kidneys,
great-stepuncle?" she had asked.

"I was once. What art going to do, lass?"

"I'm going to get our tea," she had said.

At the words, _our_ tea, the antique James Ollerenshaw, who had never
thought to have such a sensation again, was most distinctly conscious of
an agreeable, somewhat disturbing sensation of being tickled in the
small of his back.

"Well," he had asked her, "what can I do?"

"You can go out," she had replied. "Wouldn't it be a good thing for you
to go out for a walk? Tea will be ready at half-past four."

"I go for no walk," he said, positively....

"Yes, that's all right," she had murmured, but not in response to his
flat refusal to obey her. She had been opening the double cupboard and
the five drawers which constituted the receptacles of the
scullery-larders; she had been spying out the riches and the poverty of
the establishment. Then she had turned to him, and, instead of engaging
him in battle, she had just smiled at him, and said: "Very well. As you
wish. But do go into the front room, at any rate."

And there he was in the middle room, the kitchen, listening to her
movements behind the door. He heard the running of water, and then the
mild explosion of lighting the second ring of the gas-stove; the first
had been lighted by Mrs. Butt. Then he heard nothing whatever for years,
and when he looked at the clock it was fourteen minutes past four. In
the act of looking at the clock, his eye had to traverse the region of
the sofa. On the sofa were one parasol and two gloves. Astonishing,
singular, disconcerting, how those articles--which, after all, bore no
kind of resemblance to any style of furniture or hangings--seemed,
nevertheless, to refurnish the room, to give the room an air of being
thickly inhabited which it never had before!

Then she burst into the kitchen unexpectedly, with a swish of silk that
was like the retreat of waves down the shingle of some Atlantic shore.

"My dear uncle," she protested, "please do make yourself scarce. You are
in my way, and I'm very busy."

She went to the cupboard and snatched at some plates, two of which she
dropped on the table, and three of which she took into the kitchen.

"Have ye got all as ye want?" he questioned her politely, anxious to be
of assistance.

"Everything!" she answered, positively, and with just the least hint of
an intention to crush him.

"Have ye indeed!"

He did not utter this exclamation aloud; but with