“You don't know Jane,” he said. “Trespassers in the kitchen are not—welcomed.”
“And Jane doesn't know me,” replied Sara firmly.
“On your own head be it, then,” retorted the doctor, and led the way to the sacrosanct domain presided over by Jane Crab.
How Sara managed it Selwyn never knew, but she contrived to invade Jane's kitchen and perform the office of tea-making without offending her in the very least. Nay, more, by some occult process known only to herself, she succeeded in winning Jane's capacious heart, and from that moment onwards, the autocrat of the kitchen became her devoted satellite; and later, when Sara started to make drastic changes in the slip-shod arrangements of the house, her most willing ally.
“Miss Tennant's the only body in the place as has got some sense in her head,” she was heard to observe on more than one occasion.
CHAPTER VI
THE SKELETON IN SELWYN'S CUPBOARD
After tea, Selwyn escorted Sara upstairs and introduced her to his wife. Mrs. Selwyn was a slender, colourless woman, possessing the remnants of what must at one time have been an ineffective kind of prettiness. She was a determinedly chronic invalid, and rarely left the rooms which had been set aside for her use to join the other members of the family downstairs.
“The stairs try my heart, you see,” she told Sara, with the martyred air peculiar to the hypochondriac—the genuine sufferer rarely has it. “It is, of course, a great deprivation to me, and I don't think either Dick”—with an inimical glance at her husband—“or Molly come up to see me as often as they might. Stairs are no difficulty to them.”