At that moment she heard the church clock beginning to strike eight, and with a knock on the door her maid came in, carrying a little tray in one hand and a can of hot water in the other. There were a few letters slipped under the edge of the saucer on the tray, and Mrs. Martin read them while she drank her tea, but they were not very interesting, only the annual appeal from the local gardeners’ society—she thought it unthrifty to send that by post, when it could so easily have been left by hand—a couple of bills, a bulb catalogue from Holland (“Early every morning will be seen dozens of parties of men, women and children tramping up the mountains between France and Spain, singing the popular song of Harry Lauder, ‘We’re all going the same way, we’ve all gone down the hills.’ Now perhaps you will ask me why I tell this in a Bulb Catalogue, and here I will give you the answer: In the valleys of those beautiful Pyrenees mountains live numerous daffodils, which are the richest flowering of these garden-friends I ever meeted. Will you not try a couple of hundred from our stock? and you will be convinced to have invested fife bob on the good horse.”), and a letter from her sister in Devon which she put aside to read later on. The maid moved about the room, putting everything ready very quietly and skilfully. The curtains were drawn back now, and from her bed Mrs. Martin could see the wide autumn sky, gold-brown behind the scarlet trail of splay-leaved Virginia creeper that hung down outside the window. She was glad that it was neither raining nor windy. She would have the motor opened before it started for the station. The day had really begun. A rising tide of excitement made her want very much to talk to Williams, but this was against her principles, and she restrained herself. She kept glancing at Williams whenever the maid’s back was turned, or her head bent over the linen in the tidy drawers, and opening her lips to speak, but the remark faded away each time into a nervous smile, which she concealed by drinking again from her cup of tea. But when Williams came and stood by her bed to say, “The bath is quite ready, ma’am,” she could not prevent herself from speaking; she wanted to say, “You know, it’s to-day, Williams, to-day!” but instead of that she said, with detachment, “Is it a fine morning, Williams?” and Williams replied, respectful as ever, “A beautiful morning, ma’am,” but Mrs. Martin, as she got out of bed and slid her feet into the warmed bedroom slippers that were waiting for her, felt that between herself and Williams a perfectly satisfactory understanding existed. II