She began to feel very tired, and suddenly, whilst answering one of his searching, gentle questions, her voice broke, and she burst into tears. He leant quickly forward, and laid his thin, delicate right hand on hers. "My dear Mrs. Winslow, please forgive me! This has been a painful ordeal for you. I feel like a Grand Inquisitor! But now I am going to bring you comfort--I ought not to say joy. But before I do so I am going to make you take a cup of tea--and a little bread and butter. Then, afterwards, I will show you that I appreciate your generous confidence in telling me all that you have done." He waited a moment, and then said impressively, "I am going to put you in the way to make it possible for you to avenge your dead friend, I think I may also say _my_ dead friend, for Mr. Godfrey Pavely and I had some very interesting and pleasant dealings with one another, and that over many years." She was soothed by the really kind tone of his low voice, even by the caressing quality of his light touch, and her sobs died down. Mr. Howard took his hand away, and pressed a button close to his chair. A moment later a tray appeared with tea, cake, bread and butter, and a little spirit lamp on which there stood what looked like a gold tea-kettle. "You can put on the light, Denton," and there came a pleasant glow of suffused light over the room. "Perhaps you will be so kind as to make the tea?" said Mr. Howard in his full, low voice. Katty smiled her assent, and turned obediently towards the little table which had been placed by her elbow. She saw that the kettle was so fixed by a clever arrangement that there was no fear of accident, though the water in it had been brought in almost boiling on the lacquer tray--a tray which was as exquisitely choice in its way as was everything else in the room. Katty, as we know, was used to making afternoon tea. Very deftly she put three teaspoonfuls of tea into the teapot, and then poured out the boiling water from the bright yellow kettle. She was surprised at its weight. "Yes," said Greville Howard, "it's rather heavy--gold always is. It's fifteen-carat gold. I bought that kettle years ago, in Paris. It took my fancy." He looked at the clock. "We will give the tea three minutes to draw," he said thoughtfully. And then he began to talk to her about the people with whom she was staying, the people who had never seen him, but who had so deep--it now seemed to her so unreasoning and unreasonable--a prejudice against him. And what he had to say about them amused, even diverted, Katty, so shrewd were his thrusts, so true his appreciation of the faults and the virtues of dear Helen and Tony Haworth. But how on earth had he learnt all that? And then, at the end of the three minutes, she poured the tea into the transparent blue-and-white Chinese porcelain cups. "No milk, no sugar, no cream for me," he said. "Only a slice of that lemon."