!"

"I'm very glad to hear it!" responded Mrs. Mansfield, liking this
unconventional but very human servant. "Mr. Heath has spoken of my
coming, then?"

"I should think so, ma'am. This way, if you please!"

Mrs. Searle, Heath's cook-housekeeper, crossed the little dimly lit hall
and walked quickly down a rather long and narrow passage.

"He's in the studio, ma'am," she remarked over her narrow shoulder,
sharply turning her head. "Fan is with him."

"Who's Fan? A dog?"

"My little girl, ma'am."

"Oh, I beg your pardon!"

"Not knowing you were there, when the other lady went I sends her in to
him for company as he wasn't working. 'Run, Fan!' says I. 'Go and cheer
Mr. Heath up, there's a good girl!' I says. I knows very well there's
nothing like a child to put you right after you've been worried. They're
so simple, aren't they, ma'am? And we're all simple, I b'lieve, at
'eart, though we're ashamed to show it. I'm sure I don't know why!"

As she concluded she opened a door and ushered Mrs. Mansfield into the
composer's workroom.

At the far end of it, in a flicker of firelight, Mrs. Mansfield saw him
stooping down over a very fair and Saxon-looking child of perhaps three
years old, whose head was thickly covered with short yellow hair
inclined to be curly, and who was dressed in a white frock with an
almost artful blue bow in the front. As Mrs. Mansfield came in the child
was holding up to Heath a small naked doll of a rather blurred
appearance, and was uttering some explanatory remarks in the uneven but
arresting voice that seems peculiar to childhood.

"Mrs. Mansfield, if you please, sir!" said Mrs. Searle. Then, with a
change of voice: "Come along, Fan! And bring Masterman with you, there's
a good girl! We must get on his clothes or he'll catch cold." (To Mrs.
Mansfield.) "You'll excuse her, ma'am, but she's that nat'ral, clothes
or no clothes it's all one to her."

Fan turned round, holding Masterman by one leg and staring with bright
blue eyes at Mrs. Mansfield. Her countenance expressed a dignified
inquiry combined, perhaps, with a certain amount of very natural
surprise at so unseemly an interruption of her strictly private
interview with Claude Heath and Masterman. Her left thumb mechanically
sought the shelter of her mouth, and it was obvious that she was "sizing
up" Mrs. Mansfield with all the caution, if not suspicion, of the female
nature in embryo.

Heath took her gently by the shoulder as he c