Mrs. Maldon’s kitchen—­or rather Rachel’s—­was small, warm (though the fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye.  On the left wall was a deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window, a narrow deal table.  In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range, and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained doors.  There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair.  The floor was a friendly chequer of red and black tiles.  On the high mantelpiece were canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalactite of onions.

The uncurtained window, instead of showing black, gave on another interior, whitewashed, and well illuminated by the kitchen gas.  This other interior had, under a previous tenant of the property, been a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming a scullery before a greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery.  There it was that Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet.  One had to pass through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard.  And the light of day had to pass through the imperfectly transparent glass roof of the scullery in order to reach the window of the unused room behind the parlour; and herein lay the reason why that room was unused, it being seldom much brighter than a crypt.

At the table stood Rachel, in her immense pinafore-apron, busy with knives and forks and spoons, and an enamel basin from which steam rose gently.  Louis looked upon Rachel, and for the first time in his life liked an apron!  It struck him as an exceedingly piquant addition to the young woman’s garments.  It suited her; it set off the tints of her notable hair; and it suited the kitchen.  Without delaying her work, Rachel made the protector of the house very welcome.  Obviously she was in a high state of agitation.  For an instant Louis feared that the agitation was due to anxiety on account of Mrs. Maldon.

“Nothing serious up with the old lady, is there?” he asked, pinching the cigarette to regularize the tobacco in it.

“Oh, no!”

The exclamation in its absolute sincerity dissipated every trace of his apprehension.  He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too.  He was sure, then, that Rachel’s agitation was a pleasurable agitation.  It was caused solely by his entrance into the kitchen, by the compliment he was paying to her kitchen!  Her eyes glittered; her face shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious of herself—­all because he had come into her kitchen!  She could not conceal—­perhaps she did not wish to conceal—­the joy that his near presence inspired.  Louis had had few adventures, very few, and this experience was exquisite and wondrous to him.  It roused, not the fatuous coxcomb, nor the Lothario, but that in him which was honest and high-spirited.  A touch of the male’s vanity, not surprising, was to be excused.