“Mrs. Mott is giving up housekeeping altogether now, Mrs. Challoner,” Tom explained with a rueful countenance. “She’s got a tenant for the whole house, and she’s going to live in the country in some little place which she can manage alone. She says she is ‘weary of her life because of those daughters of Heth’—meaning the servant girls. You know the way she speaks, Mrs. Challoner.” Lucy laughed. She knew Mrs. Mott very well, and she was beginning to realise the difficulties which must beset such a person. “I sympathise with her,” she said. “But surely many of her servants must have been models! I thought the house always looked so bright and pleasant.” “She says that’s because she put herself into it,” explained Tom. “Just whatever they left undone, she says, she did, and she did it all, when they ran away or gave her notice and went off before she had got another. Now she says she can’t do so any more; she’s near sixty, and her feet are weak, and she can’t manage the stairs, and she won’t keep people in her house if it can’t be kept as it should be. I’m sure she might let her place go very different from what it is, and yet it would be a palace of neatness compared with the houses which I’ve seen since I’ve been looking for lodgings,” added poor Tom ruefully. “Has she had any special trouble lately?” asked Lucy. “She says that for the last three years she has only had one girl who was respectable and willing to learn, and she attended some class or guild where the ladies told her she was ‘too good for domestic service’ and took her off to be trained as a hospital nurse,” answered Tom. “Oh, dear, dear!” said Lucy, “as if the work of prevention is not far better and more honourable than that of mere cure. And it ought to be more honoured!” “We have had some very queer customers lately, I must say,” Tom went on in his blunt boyish way. “Young Hinton—that’s the other fellow who stays at Mrs. Mott’s—happened to have a good deal of note-paper and some hundreds of envelopes marked with a handsome H. Well, he never could understand how that paper went off so quickly. He would take out a packet, and write a few letters, and then the next time he went to write he would find the packet almost empty. He used to say it was bewitched! Well, Mrs. Mott caught that servant in the act of stealing something—I think it was taking out coal in the big basket she carried to fetch potatoes. When Mrs. Mott counted over her other things she found some towels missing. So she told the girl she had better open her box and show what else she had, and there, along with the towels, were heaps of Hinton’s paper and envelopes, and what was funniest of all, an old album of his with a lot of half-faded photos of his aunts and cousins. Now what could she have wanted with that? The paper, of course, she meant to use, because her name was Hannah—an H, you see.”