Between them Juliet and Rachel Redding served the various dishes and changed the plates which Anthony handed from his place. It was gracefully done and so simply that the absence of a maid was a thing to be enjoyed rather than regretted. When Juliet, in the softly sweeping dull-red frock which made of her a warm picture for a winter's night, slipped from her chair and moved about the room, or brought in from the kitchen a steaming dish, she seemed the ideal hostess, herself bestowing what her own hands had prepared. And when Rachel Redding offered a man a cup of fragrant coffee, smiling down in the general direction of his uplifted face without meeting his eyes, there was certainly nothing lost from his enjoyment of the beverage. "Say, but this dinner has tasted just about right," was Wayne Carey's satisfied observation as he leaned back in his chair at last, after draining his third cup of coffee--and the pot itself, if he had but known it. "Went to the spot?" asked Anthony, leaning back also with the expression of the friendly host. He was young to cultivate that expression, but he appeared to find no difficulty about it. "It did--every last mouthful." "Good. Now, if you fellows will come back to the fire and have a pipeful of talk we shall not be missed. In this house on ordinary occasions we reverse the order of after-dinner privileges--the men retire to the atmosphere of the sofa-pillows, and the women--I'm not allowed to tell what they do. But after remaining discreetly out of sight for some little time, during which faint sounds as of the rattle of china penetrate through closed doors, they reappear, pleasantly flushed and full of a sort of relieved joy." "I know what I wish," said Roger Barnes, looking back from the dining-room doorway at young Mrs. Robeson; "I wish that when the dishes are all ready you would let me know. I should like nothing better than to have a dish-towel at them. I know all about it--my mother taught me how." He looked so precisely as if he meant it, and the glance he sent past Juliet at Rachel Redding was so suggestive of his dislike to be separated for the coming hour from the feminine portion of the household, that his hostess answered promptly: "Of course you may. We never refuse an offer like that. We will try you--on promise of good behaviour." XII.--THE BACHELOR BEGS A DISH-TOWEL When the door closed on the three Juliet produced from somewhere two aprons--attractive affairs on the pinafore order--one of which she slipped upon Rachel, the other donned herself. "These are my kitchen party-aprons," she said gayly, noting how the pretty garment became the girl, "calculated to impress the masculine mind with the charm of domesticity in women. The doctor needs a little illustrated lesson of the sort. Life in boarding-houses isn't adapted to encourage a man in the belief that real comfort is to be found anywhere outside of a bachelor's club."