There was a certain habitual jerk around and quelling stare upward--his "pur-rsonal power" must be kept active--which Sir Thomas always delivered when the maid reached his chair. Alice, who had been a maid of many employers, whose eccentricities she had made a point of humoring, had early noted this gesture of Harrison's, and had always made a point of pausing two or three feet away until the observance was over, to avoid possibility of accident to the dish she bore. But Daisy, hurrying to the table, was caught unprepared, right at Harrison's side. His jerking shoulder hit the bottom of the soup-tureen. It fell, and with it a Niagara of hot soup poured down Sir Thomas' arm and shoulder and into his lap. This happened before he had time to follow the twist around with the usual glare upward. A delightful feeling of unloosed anger flowed over the contractor. Here at least was an excuse to "call down" the wary Alice. Sweeping the greasy surplus from vest and trousers with a scrape or two of the side of his napkin, Harrison gathered up his blue jowl, narrowed his eyes, knitted his forehead, and wrenched his head around to bellow. Then he saw, not the white-lashed, thin-nosed Alice, but Daisy, flushing and dimpling irrepressibly as she bent to pick up the soup-tureen. What Harrison had intended to say was something like this: "Blast your sun-kissed English hide, you'll pay for this mess. An' then I'll fire you ..." etc., etc.--making each sentence hurt as much as possible, according to his knowledge of Alice's sensibilities. What Sir Thomas Harrison actually did say, after a brief stare at the new maid, was this: "Pretty good for a start-off, little one. Pret-ty good!" And Daisy, kneeling over the upturned dish, her face below the edge of the table and invisible from the lady and the guest, tipped her head a little to one side and twinkled up at her employer out of the corner of her eye. His face changed ever so little--just a slight lowering of the eyelids and a quiver outward of the thick lower lip--but enough to let Daisy know that she would have no more trouble with Sir Thomas Harrison except that peculiar kind of trouble she knew well how to deal with--that kind of trouble which made life, for pretty and piquant Daisy Nixon, a continuous chain of daring adventures. * * * * * Sir William Ware was a stroller, with hands in pockets, on the veranda of the world. It is true that he was a bank president; but the position, even more honorary than bank presidencies usually are, gave him as little work or concern as his several other business connections of the same kind. Agents did the worrying; Sir William merely spent the money, or as much of it as a bachelor of quiet tastes required. A large unused portion of his income was reinvested each year. The principal thus grew instead of shrank; and Sir William, as he put it, had long ago "quite given up hope of ever being able to die a pauper."