“Aunt Betty wouldn’t have let you come into the kitchen if you handled your rolling-pin that way. Let me show you.” “Which is the best argument yet for the change of cooks,” said Middleton, guilefully holding the rolling-pin more and more awkwardly, for the very pleasure of being set right by her. “Now, don’t you think I am worth a button?” “No, but you may learn.” “Unfortunately, I am going away.” “Are you?—When are you coming back?”—A polite little tone coming into her voice. “Never.” He tried to say it as indifferently as he had said it in practising when he rode up, which he liked better than the tragic “NEVER!” which he had first proposed to himself; and all the time he was watching her out of the tail of his eye. She said nothing, and he felt a little disappointed. “We are ordered away—” he began. She was busying herself about something. But he was sure she had heard. “—to the Northwest to keep the Indians down,” he proceeded. “Oh!” She turned quickly toward him, and their eyes met. “Well, I hope you’ll be as successful and find your task as pleasant there as you have here.” Her head had gone up, as it did on the veranda the night of the ball. “I do not appear to have been particularly successful here,” Middleton began, banteringly, then walked over to her side. “Miss Cary, do you think I have really enjoyed my task here?” “Why—yes,” she began; then she glanced up and found him grave. “I don’t know—I thought——” “No,” said Middleton, “you did not.” Just at that moment a shadow fell across the light, and Mammy Krenda stood in the door. “Well—I declare!” she exclaimed, with well-feigned astonishment. “What in the worl’ air you doin’ in this kitchen?” They both thought she was addressing Middleton, and he began to stammer a reply; but it was her young mistress whose presence there appeared to scandalize the old woman. “Don’t you know you ain’ got no business in heah? I can’t turn my back to git nothin’, but what you come interferin’ wid my things. Go right in de house dis minute and put yo’ nice clo’es on. I air really ashamed o’ you to let a gent—a—anybody see you dat way.” She was pushing Blair out gently. “I don’ know what she air doin’ in heah,” she said to Middleton, addressing him for the first time, and with some disdain in her manner, as if she wished him to understand that he had no business there either. As Blair passed him on her way out she said to him in a whisper, with a low laugh: “That’s a yarn. I do nearly all the cooking since our cook went off, but she thinks it’s beneath my dignity to be caught at it.”