The drive from King's Cross to Hampstead took a long time. No doubt the horse and the coachman were both tired, for Aunt Cuckoo explained that she had been shopping in London all day and that really she ought to have gone home much earlier. The small brougham looked like one of those commercial broughams in which old-fashioned travellers drive round to exhibit their wares to old-fashioned firms. Nor did the coachman look like a proper coachman, because he had a moustache, which somehow made the cockade in his hat look like a moustache too. When he stood up to push the trunk into place, Jasmine noticed that he was wearing baggy trousers under his coat, and for a moment she wondered if it could possibly be Uncle Eneas himself who was driving them. Afterward she discovered that he was really the gardener who consented to drive the brougham occasionally, because the horse was useful to his horticulture. The climb up to the summit of the Heath seemed endless; Jasmine was glad when they got on to level ground again and the cardboard boxes fell back into place. Every time the rays of a passing lamp splashed the brougham Jasmine felt that she ought to say something, but before she had time to think of anything to say it was dark again; and the next splash of light always came as a surprise, so that in the end she gave up trying to think of anything to say and counted the lamp-posts instead. Driving in a brougham with Aunt Cuckoo reminded her of playing hide-and-seek in a wardrobe, when, although one was delighted to have found a good place in which to hide, one hoped that the searchers would not be long in finding it out. Half-way down the tree-shaded slope of North End Road on the far side of the Heath the brougham turned aside down a short drive and pulled up before an irregular and what appeared in the darkness a rather attractive house. When the door was opened by a sallow butler, Jasmine perceived that the reason for her aunt's prolonged silence during the drive back was a large black respirator, of which she unmuzzled herself before she asked the butler something in a language which Jasmine did not understand, but which she afterwards found was Greek. Then, turning to her niece, she divulged as if it was a family secret that Uncle Eneas had gone to dine at his club that night. Jasmine was not sorry to be spared the anxiety of another introduction so soon, and she eagerly accepted her aunt's proposal to dine earlier than usual so that she could get a good night's rest after the tiring journey. "I've ordered _pilau_ for you," Aunt Cuckoo announced. Jasmine wondered what this was and hoped it would not be too rich a dish. The oriental hangings in the dining-room portended an exotic type of food, and she had been rather shaken by the train. "But it's just like our own _risotto_," she exclaimed when the heap of well-greased rice sown with morsels of meat was put before her.