"Stop twiddling that door handle," said Miss Hancock, entirely ignoring Leavesley, "and attend to what I'm saying. If you are paid to keep this room in order you are defrauding your mistress, and girls who defraud their mistresses end in something worse. Go, get a duster." The feelings of Cruiser, when he first came under the hands of Mr Rarey, may have been comparable to the feelings of Belinda before this servant-tamer. She recognised a mistress, but she did not give in at once. She stood looking sulkily from Leavesley to his aunt, and from his aunt to Leavesley. Miss Hancock had no legal power over her, it was all moral. "Go, get a duster and a broom," cried Miss Hancock, stamping her foot. One second more the animal stood in mute rebellion, then it went off and got the duster and the broom. "Take up that strip of carpet," commanded Mr Leavesley's aunt, when the duster and the broom returned in the hands of the animal. "Whew! Throw it outside the door and beat it in the back garden, if you have such a thing--burn it if you haven't. Give me the duster. Now sweep the floor, whilst I do these shelves; Frank, put those books in a heap. Whew! does no one ever clean this place? Ha! what are you doing sweeping under the couch? Pull out that couch. Mercy!!!" Under the couch there was a heap of miscellaneous things--empty cigarette tins, an empty beer bottle, an empty whisky bottle, half a pack of cards, a dress tie, a glove, "The Three Musketeers," and an old waistcoat--_and_ dust, mounds of dust. Miss Hancock looked at this. Like the coster who looked back along the City road to see the way strewn with cabbages, lettuces, and onions which had leaked from his faulty barrow, language was quite inadequate to express her feelings. "Go, get a dust-pan," she said at last, "and a basket. Be quick about it. Mercy!!!" By the time the place was in order, Belinda, to Leavesley's astonishment, had become transformed from a sulky-looking slattern to a semi-respectable-looking servant girl. "That will do," said Miss Hancock in a magisterial voice, when the last consignment of rubbish had been removed. "Now, you can go." As the boar sharpens its tusks against a tree preparatory to using them to carve human flesh, so had Miss Hancock sharpened the tusks of her temper upon Belinda. "No thanks, I don't want any tea," she said, replying to Leavesley's invitation. "I've come to ask you for an explanation." "What of?" "What you said the other day." "What did I say the other day?" "About your uncle." "About my uncle?" he replied, wrinkling his forehead. He couldn't for the life of him think what she was driving at; he had quite forgotten his Parthian remark about the "girl," the thing had no root in his mind--a bubble made of words that had risen to the surface of his mind, burst, and been forgotten. Miss Hancock had her own way of dealing with hypocrites. "Well, we will say no more about your uncle. How about Miss Lambert?"