'Thank you, Sarah. That will do.' Aunt Annie dismissed her frigidly.
'Yes'm.'
Sarah's departing face fell to humility, and it said now: 'I'm sorry I presumed to be as excited about your plot as you are.'
The two sisters looked at each other interrogatively, disturbed, alarmed, shocked.
'Can she have been listening at doors?' Aunt Annie inquired in a whisper.
Wherever the sisters happened to be, they never discussed Sarah save in a whisper. If they had been in Alaska and Sarah in Timbuctoo, they would have mentioned her name in a whisper, lest she might overhear. And, by the way, Sarah's name was not Sarah, but Susan. It had been altered in deference to a general opinion that it was not nice for a servant to bear the same name as her mistress, and, further, that such an anomaly had a tendency to subvert the social order.
'I don't know,' said Mrs. Knight 'I put her straight about those lumps of sugar.'
'Did you tell her to see to the hot-water bottle?'
'Bless us, no!'
Aunt Annie rang the bell.