"But if I don't have it, you will stay and take tea with me?"
Matilda looked wistful, and hesitated. Her mother would not miss her; but could Maria get the tea without her?—
"And I dare say you want to talk to me about something; isn't it so?" the minister continued.
"Yes, Mr. Richmond; I do."
"That settles it. She will stay, Miss Redwood. I shall have some gingerbread, I hope. And when you are ready, Tilly, you can come to me in my room."
The minister quitted the kitchen in good time, for now the cakes were almost done and needed care. A little watchful waiting, and then the plumped up, brown, glossy loaves of gingerbread said to even an inexperienced eye that it was time for them to come out of the oven. Miss Redwood showed Matilda how to arrange them on a sieve, where they would not get steamy and moist; and Matilda's eye surveyed them there with very great satisfaction.
"That's as nice as if I had made it myself," said the housekeeper. "Now don't you want to get the minister's tea?"
"What shall I do, Miss Redwood?"
"I thought maybe you'd like to learn how to manage something else. He's had no dinner to-day—to speak of; and if eatin' ain't the business of life—which it ain't, I guess, with him—yet stoppin' eatin' would stop business, he'd find; and I'm goin' to frizzle some beef for his supper, and put an egg in. Now I'll cut the beef, and you can stir it, if you like."
Matilda liked very much. She watched the careful shaving of the beef in paper-like fragments; then at the housekeeper's direction she put some butter in a pan on the fire, and when it was hot threw the beef in and stirred it back and forward with a knife, so as not to let it burn, and so as to bring all the shavings of beef in contact with the hot pan bottom, and into the influence of the boiling butter. At the moment of its being done, the housekeeper broke an egg or two into the pan; and then in another moment bade Matilda take it from the fire and turn it out. Meanwhile Miss Redwood had cut bread and made the tea.