I smiled, and felt the colour rise in my face. (How I used to curse that girlish blushing habit!)

'Tssp! Well, I see you can take a joke, anyway; an' that's even more important, really, than horticulturous knowledge. Tssp! There's my breakfast bell, an' I'm not dressed. Jus' come along this way, Nickperry.'

In the neatly paved yard at the back of the house stood a well-conditioned cow, of the colour of a new-husked horse chestnut. She was peacefully chewing her cud, oblivious quite to the flight of time. Mr. Perkins ambled swiftly into the house, rolling out again, as it seemed within the second, as though he had bounced against an inner wall, and handing me a milk-pail.

'Stool over there. Jus' milk the cow for me, Nickperry. Seeyagaindreckly!'

And he was gone, having floated within doors, like a huge ball of thistledown on well-oiled castors. Next moment I heard his mellow, rotund voice again, several rooms away.

'Sossidge! Sossidge! Whajerdoin'?' Then a pause. Then--'Keep brekfus' three minutes, Sossidge; I'm not dressed.'

With a mind somewhat confused, I turned to the red cow, and my first task for Mr. Perkins. Bella--I learned subsequently that the cow, when a young heifer, had been given this name by Mr. Perkins, because she distinguished herself by bellowing incessantly for a whole night--proved a singularly amiable beast. I was light-handed, and a fair milker, I believe. Still, my hands were strange to Bella; yet she gave down her milk most generously, and, though standing in the open, without bail or leg-rope, never stirred till the foaming pail was three parts full, and her udder dry. It was something of a revelation to me, for our cows at St. Peter's had been rough scrub cattle, and had been left to pick up their own living for the most part; whereas Bella was aldermanic, a monument of placid satiety.

I very carefully deposited the pail inside the scullery entrance, and withdrew then to a respectful distance, with Bella. Would this amazing Mr. Perkins engage me? There was no doubt in my mind that I hoped he would. I had seen practically nothing of the place, and my impressions of it must all have been produced by the personality of its owner, I suppose. But it did seem to me that this establishment possessed an atmosphere of cheery kindliness and jollity such as I had never before found about any residence. The contrast between this place and St. Peter's was extraordinarily striking. I wondered what Sister Agatha would have made of Mr. Perkins, or he of Sister Agatha. 'Acidulacious' was the word he would have applied to Sister Agatha, I thought, with a boy's readiness in mimicry; and I chuckled happily to myself in the thinking.

IX

While I stood in the yard cogitating, a woman whose white-spotted blue dress was for the most part covered by a very white apron emerged from the scullery door, holding one hand over her eyes to shade them from the morning sun.