“I don’t suppose you did,” remarked that lady. “You see, Katty made them.”
“Wasn’t she good, now, to let me, Miss Norah?” Katty asked. “There’s them at home that towld me I’d get no chance at all of learning under a grand cook here. ’Tis little the likes of them ’ud give you to do in the kitchen: if you asked them for a job, barring it was to wash the floor, they’d pitch you to the Sivin Divils. ‘Isn’t the scullery good enough for you?’ they’d say. ‘Cock you up with the cooking!’ But Miss de Lisle isn’t one of them—and the cakes to go up to the drawing-room itself!”
“Well, every one liked them, Katty,” Norah said.
“Yerra, hadn’t I Bridie watching behind the big screen with the crack in it?” said the handmaid. “She come back to me, and she says, ‘They’re all ate,’ says she: ‘’tis the way ye had not enough made,’ she says. I didn’t know if ’twas on me head or me heels I was!” She bent a look of adoration upon Miss de Lisle, who laughed.
“Oh, I’ll make a cook of you yet, Katty,” she said. “Meanwhile you’d better put some coal on the fire, or the oven won’t be hot enough for my pastry. Is it early breakfast for your brother and Mr. Wally, Miss Linton?”
“I’m afraid so,” Norah said. “Jim said they must leave at eight o’clock.”
“Then that means breakfast at seven-thirty. Will you have yours with them?”
“Oh yes, please—if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Nothing’s a trouble—certainly not an early breakfast,” said Miss de Lisle. “Now don’t worry about anything.”
Norah went back to the hall—to find it deserted. A buzz of voices came from the billiard-room; she peeped in to find all the soldiers talking with her father listening happily in a big chair. No one saw her: she withdrew, and went in search of Mrs. West, but failed to find her. Bride, encountered in her evening tour with cans of hot water, reported that ’twas lying down she was, and not wishful for talk: her resht was more to her.