“Pretty well, Sir, pretty well. The governess will be meddling--these sort of people can’t keep from it--about the house expenses, and so on; but I don’t stand it, nohow. I just say, ‘This is the way we always do, Mam’sel. It’s just thirty-eight years I’m with the master’s father and himself.’ Isn’t that a pictur’ of a steak, Mr. M’Kinlay? Did you ever see sweeter fat than that, and the gravy in it, Sir? Mrs. Byles knows _you_, Sir, and does her best. You remember that game-pie, Sir, the last time you was here?” “I think I do, and you told her what I said of it; but I don’t like what you say of the governess. She is meddlesome--interferes, eh?” “Everywhere, Sir, wherever she can. With George about the hothouse plants and the melon-frames, with Mrs. Byles about the preserves, a thing my lady never so much as spoke of; and t’other day, Sir, what d’ye think she does, but comes and says to me, ‘Mr. Rickards, you have a cellar-book, haven’t you?’ Yes, ma’am,’ says I; ‘and if the young ladies wants it in the schoolroom to larn out of, I’ll bring it in with pleasure.’ Wasn’t that pretty home, Sir, eh?” “And what did she say to that?” “She whisked about this way”--here Mr. Rickards made a bold pirouette--“and said something in high Dutch that I feel sure wasn’t a blessing.” “Tell me one thing, Rickards,” said the lawyer, in a lower tone, and with the air of a complete confidant. “What’s this little game she’s playing about that Irish girl, writing to my lady that she’s a genius, that she can do this, that, and t’other, and that you’ve only to show her a book, and she knows it from cover to cover?” “And don’t you see what it is, Sir?” said Rickards, with one eye knowingly closed; “don’t you see it, Sir?” “No, Rickards, I do not.” “It’s all the way that little sarpent has of comin’ round her. Of all the creatures ever I seen, I never knew her equal for cunning. It ain’t any use knowing she’s a fox--not a bit of it, Sir--she’ll get round you all the same. It’s not an easy thing to get to the blind side of Mrs. Byles, I promise you. She’s a very knowledgeable woman, lived eleven years under a man-cook at Lord Wandsford’s, and knows jellies, and made French dishes as well as Monsieur Honoré himself. Well, Sir, that imp there winds her round her finger like a piece of packthread. She goes and says, ‘Byles’--she doesn’t as much as Mrs. Byles her, the way my lady would--but ‘Byles,’ says she, ‘if ever I come to be a great lady and very rich, I’ll have you to keep my house, and you shall have your own nice sittin’-room, and your own maid to wait on you, and a hundred a year settled on you for your life.’ I vow it’s a fact, Sir, wherever she heard of such a thing, but she said ‘settled on you for life;’ and then, Sir, she’ll sit down and help her with the strawberry-jam, or the brandy-peaches, or whatever it is, and Mrs. Byles says there wouldn’t be her equal in all England, if she only took to be a still-room maid.”