Mary took the girl into the kitchen, brewed her some coffee, and saw that she ate an honest meal. Then she showed her the whole house—the attic that was to be her bedroom, the press where the clean linen was kept, the closet where the pans and brushes were. She gave Bess one of her own aprons, an old pair of house shoes, and a cap. Bess had much of the practical in her constitution, and, moreover, she was burning to prove her gratitude to her friends. There was to be a leg of mutton for Dr. Sugg’s dinner that day. Bess bared her brown forearms, fastened on her apron, and blessed old Ursula for having taught her to be useful. Dr. Sugg was delighted with her cooking and with the quiet and graceful way she waited at table. Mary, a perfect housewife herself, congratulated her father on their refugee’s success. “The girl looks quite a lady,” she said. “I must say I am in love with her, though she has only been with us half a day. I trust her terrible kinsfolk will not trouble her here.” Dr. Sugg frowned and looked bellicose. “The authority of this house,” he answered, “is sufficient to awe the rascals. My sympathies are wholly with the girl, my dear, and I shall protect her to the best of my ability.” XXII The old parsonage house, with its sombre atmosphere and its silence broken only by the ticking of the great Dutch clock in the parlor, seemed to Bess a secluded hermitage where she would be safe from her kinsfolk and from the savagery of her forest lover. The kitchen was in the wing at the back of the house, shut off from the fields by Dr. Sugg’s orchard and a holly hedge, and parted on the west from the church-yard by the garden and a high stone-wall. The very consciousness of her nearness to Jeffray filled her with contentment. She flitted about the brick-paved kitchen singing to herself at times, and thinking of Jeffray as she did her work. There was the cow to be called in from the parsonage meadow and milked at dawn and sunset. Mary Sugg herself answered the kitchen door so that Bess’s presence should be kept as secret as possible. Dr. Sugg alone went into Rodenham village, for since the breaking out of the small-pox his daughter had kept to the house and garden, leaving such business as lay outside the rectory to her father. Bess served her new friends with all the ardor of her nature. She brushed Dr. Sugg’s coat for him, buckled on his shoes, and warmed his slippers. As for Miss Mary, she had fallen coyly in love with their handsome handmaid, and treated her more as a friend than as a servant.