"I shan't be in to lunch for a few days, Mrs. Worfolk, no--er--nor to dinner either as a matter of fact. No--in fact I'll be down in the country. I must see after things there, you know," he added with an attempt to suggest as jovially as possible a real anxiety about his new house. "The country, oh yes," repeated Mrs. Worfolk grimly; John saw the beech-woods round Ambles blasted by his housekeeper's disapproval. "You wouldn't care to--er--come down and give a look round yourself, Mrs. Worfolk? My sister, Mrs. Curtis--" "Oh, I should prefer not to intrude in any way, sir. But if you insist, why, of course--" "Oh no, I don't insist," John hurriedly interposed. "No, sir. Well, we shall all have to get used to being left alone nowadays, and that's all there is to it." "But I shall be back in a few days, Mrs. Worfolk. I'm a Cockney at heart, you know. Just at first--" Mrs. Worfolk shook her head and waddled tragically to the door. "There's nothing else you'll be wanting this morning, sir?" she turned to ask in accents that seemed to convey forgiveness of her master in spite of everything. "No, thank you, Mrs. Worfolk. Please send Maud up to help me pack. Good heavens," he added to himself when his housekeeper had left the room, "why shouldn't I be allowed a country house? And I suppose the next thing is that James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor will all be offended because I didn't go tearing round to see them the moment I arrived. One's relations never understand that after the production of a play one requires a little rest. Besides, I must get on with my new play. I absolutely _must_." John's tendency to abhor the vacuum of success was corrected by the arrival of Maud, the parlor-maid, whose statuesque anemia and impersonal neatness put something in it. Before leaving for America he had supplemented the rather hasty preliminary furnishing of his new house by ordering from his tailor a variety of country costumes. These Maud, with feminine intuition superimposed on what she would have called her "understanding of valeting," at once produced for his visit to Ambles; John in the prospect of half a dozen unworn peat-perfumed suits of tweed flung behind him any lingering doubt about there being something in success, and with the recapture of his enthusiasm for what he called "jolly things" was anxious that Maud should share in it. "Do you think these new things are a success, Maud?" he asked, perhaps a little too boisterously. At any rate, the parlor-maid's comprehension of valeting had apparently never been so widely stretched, for a faint coralline blush tinted her waxen cheeks. "They seem very nice, sir," she murmured, with a slight stress upon the verb.