Therefore Scrap came to the conclusion she would be quite safe in the garden that day, and got up as usual after breakfast, and dawdled as usual through her dressing, listening with a slightly cocked ear to the sounds of Mr. Wilkins’s arrival, of his luggage being carried into Lotty’s room on the other side of the landing, of his educated voice as he inquired of Lotty, first, “Do I give this fellow anything?” and immediately afterwards, “Can I have a hot bath?”—of Lotty’s voice cheerfully assuring him that he needn’t give the fellow anything because he was the gardener, and that yes, he could have a hot bath; and soon after this the landing was filled with the familiar noises of wood being brought, of water being brought, of feet running, of tongues vociferating—in fact, with the preparation of the bath. Scrap finished dressing, and then loitered at her window, waiting till she should hear Mr. Wilkins go into the bathroom. When he was safely there she would slip out and settle herself in her garden and resume her inquiries into the probable meaning of her life. She was getting on with her inquiries. She dozed much less frequently, and was beginning to be inclined to agree that tawdry was the word to apply to her past. Also she was afraid that her future looked black. There—she could hear Mr. Wilkins’s educated voice again. Lotty’s door had opened, and he was coming out of it asking his way to the bathroom. “It’s where you see the crowd,” Lotty’s voice answered—still a cheerful voice, Scrap was glad to notice. His steps went along the landing, and Lotty’s steps seemed to go downstairs, and then there seemed to be a brief altercation at the bathroom door—hardly so much an altercation as a chorus of vociferations on one side and a wordless determination, Scrap judged, to have a bath by oneself on the other. Mr. Wilkins knew no Italian, and the expression _pericoloso_ left him precisely as it found him—or would have if he had seen it, but naturally he took no notice of the printed matter on the wall. He firmly closed the door on the servants, resisting Domenico, who tried to the last to press through, and locked himself in as a man should for his bath, judicially considering, as he made his simple preparations for getting in, the singular standard of behaviour of these foreigners who, both male and female, apparently wished to stay with him while he bathed. In Finland, he had heard, the female natives not only were present on such occasions but actually washed the bath-taking traveller. He had not heard, however, that this was true too of Italy, which somehow seemed much nearer civilisation—perhaps because one went there, and did not go to Finland.