“No bread!” Harriet commented, leaning over the big pot with a guttering dip. “Wish I’d left that last tough old crust at supper. Weren’t there some biscuits in that sixpence-ha’penny glass thing in the dining-room? Just think on about them, will you? Half a blanc-mange and a few pine-apple chunks—that’s no use to a hungry man! It’s all he’ll get for breakfast, though, by the look of things. I wonder if it’s any good going down into the cellar? Helwise said there was no meat, didn’t she? Eggs? No, I’m afraid not! There must be some milk, though—I wonder where? Might be in the boot-cupboard, on this system. Come on! We’ve got to unearth that soup somehow!”
They found the full tin stowed thoughtfully among a stack of empty ones, and in the dirty kitchen Harriet began her labours by the light of a gas-jet that burnt one-sidedly with a shrieking flame. Fortunately for present conditions, though not for the master’s pocket, the fire had been left piled up high; but this piece of criminal wastefulness was the only happy accident that befell them.
“What beats me,” Harriet remarked, sniffing disgustedly at pans, and flinging half-washed spoons into a slimy tin in a stopped-up sink, “is why Lanty hasn’t been poisoned before now, or at any rate sold up and carted to the Workhouse. It’s too bad of old Helwise, it really is! After all, he keeps her, and he works jolly hard. She might have done him a bit better than this. Do you mind cleaning a few of these things while I open the soup?”
So while Harriet boiled, Dandy scrubbed, and produced, by some conjuror’s wand, a bowl and silver spoon, a small tray and a passably clean tray-cloth; also the biscuits. When the soup was added, steaming and strong, they looked at each other with conscious pride, on the heels of which came a sudden sense of guilt and confusion. After all, it was open to question that a couple of outsiders should be cooking food for a man in his own kitchen without his permission or even his knowledge.
“How are you going back?” Harriet asked, covering in the range, and slipping a plate over the lidless bowl. “I meant to have cleared out long before this. I hope Stubbs hasn’t been worrying Cyril.”
The name came out naturally enough, but Dandy started a little. The use of it by Harriet seemed to put her old friend Wiggie in a new light.
“Father is coming for me,” she replied. “He had to go to Manchester to-day, but he said he’d run over as soon as he got back. He wanted to see Mr. Lancaster. You’ll wait and come with us, won’t you? He should be here any time now, and I can’t stop alone, with my hostess locked away upstairs.”
“Right you are!” Harriet lifted the tray with reverent care. “Put out that one-eyed gas, will you, and light the candle? There’s a cockroach crawling up you—don’t know if you’re keen on ’em! You’d better go on in front and yell out if there are any booby-traps. I nearly broke my shin over a clothes-horse, and we can’t afford to lose the soup.”
But in the hall she stopped, even as her hand was raised to knock, for Dandy, with flushed cheeks, had stepped back into the firelight from the drawing-room, bringing to the other how Lanty had paused—from her corner she had seen him—paused, weary as he was, to look at the same picture. There had been in his face something of which he had not known, but which even Harriet, unobservant and callous, had not failed to read. It was as if, in that instant, he had seen at last the “silly home” of his desire.
She drew back, holding out the tray.