He not only pumped the kettle full, but carried it into the kitchen, and bullied or flattered the goddesses there until they gave him the hottest place for it on the red-hot stove.  Meanwhile, as my eyes accustomed themselves to darkness after light, I spied in the courtyard of the pump a shed piled with wood; and my uncomfortably prophetic soul said that if Lady Turnour were to have a fire, the woodpile and I must do the trick together.  Souls can be mistaken though, sometimes, if consciences never can; and Brother Adversity contradicted mine by darting out again to see what I was doing, ordering me to stop, and doing it all himself.

I ran to beg for immediate bed-linen while he annexed a portion of the family woodpile, and we met outside my mistress’s door.  On the threshold I confidently expected her grateful ladyship to say:  “What are you doing with that wood, Dane?” But she was too much crushed under her own load of cold and discomfort to object to his and wish it transferred to me.  I’d knelt down to make a funeral pyre of paper roses, when in a voice low yet firm my brother ordered me to my feet.  This wasn’t work for girls when men were about, he grumbled; and perhaps it was as well, for I never made a wood fire in my life.  As for him, he might have been a fire-tamer, so quickly did the flames leap up and try to lick his hands.  When it was certain that they couldn’t go stealthily crawling away again, he shot from the room, and in two minutes was back with the big kettle of hot water under whose weight I should have staggered and fallen, perhaps.

By this time I had made the bed, and tumbled all reminders of the two “sympathetic messieurs” ruthlessly into no-man’s land outside the door.  Things began to look more cheerful.  Lady Turnour brightened visibly; and when appetizing smells of cooking stole through the wide cracks all round the door she decided that, after all, she would dine.

It was not until after I had seen her descend with her husband, and had finished unpacking, that I had a chance to think of my own affairs.  Then I did wonder on what shelf I was to lie, or on what hook hang, for the night.  I had no information yet as regarded my own sleeping or eating, but both began to assume importance in my eyes, and I went down to learn my fate.  Where was I to dine?  Why, in the kitchen, to be sure, since the salle a manger was in use as a sitting-room until bedtime.  As for sleeping—­why, that was a difficult matter.  It was true that the English milord had spoken of a room for me, but in the press of business it had been forgotten.  What a pity that the chauffeur and I were not a married couple, n’est pas? That would make everything quite simple.  But—­as it was, no doubt there was a box-room, and matters would arrange themselves when there was time to attend to them.

“Matters have already arranged themselves,” announced Mr. Jack Dane, from the door of the pump-court.  “I heard Sir Samuel speak about your accommodation, and I saw that nothing was being done, so I discovered the box-room, and it is now ready, all but bed-covering.  And for fear there might be trouble about that, I’ve put Lady Turnour’s cushions and rugs on the alleged bed.  Would you like to have a look at your quarters now, or are you too hungry to care?”