“We must remember him like this,” Mrs. Mallett said, raising her soft blue eyes, and Henrietta saw that the small sharp lines which Reginald Mallett had helped to carve in her face seemed to have disappeared. It was extraordinary how placid her face became after his death, but as the days passed it was also noticeable that much of her vitality had gone too. She left herself in Henrietta’s young hands and she, casting about for a way of earning her living, found good fortune in the terrible basement kitchen where Mrs. Banks moved mournfully and had her disconsolate being. The gas was always lighted in that cavernous kitchen, but it remained dark, mercifully leaving the dirt half unseen. A joint of mutton, cold and mangled, was discernible, however, when Henrietta descended to put her impecunious case before the landlady and, gazing at it, the girl saw also her opportunity. Mrs. Banks had no culinary imagination, but Henrietta found it rising in herself to an inspired degree and there and then she offered herself as cook in return for board and lodging for her mother and herself. “I’m sure I’ll be glad to keep you,” Mrs. Banks said: “you give the place a tone, you do really, you and your dear Ma sitting in the drawing-room sewing of an evening; but it isn’t only the cooking, though I do get to hate the sight of food. I get a regular grudge against it. But it’s that butcher! Ready money or no meat’s his motto, and how to make this mutton last—” She picked it up by the bone and cast it down again. “Oh, I can manage butchers,” Henrietta said. “Besides, we’ll pay our way. You’ll see. Leave the cooking to me.” “I will, gladly,” Mrs. Banks said, wiping away a tear. “Ever since Banks took it into his head to jump into the river, it seems like as if I hadn’t any spirit, and that Jenkins turns up his ugly nose every time I put the mutton on the table—when he doesn’t begin talking to it like an old friend. I can’t bear Jenkins, but he does pay regular, and that’s something. Well, I’ll get on with the upstairs and leave you to it.” And so Henrietta began the work which kept her amazingly happy, fed and sheltered her mother, who sat all day slowly making beautiful baby linen for one of the big shops, and cemented Henrietta’s friendship with the lachrymose Mrs. Banks. To be faced with a mutton bone and a few vegetables, to have to wrest from these poor materials an appetizing meal, was like an exciting game, and she played it with zest and with success. She had the dubious pleasure of hearing Mr. Jenkins smack his lips and seeing him distend his nostrils with anticipation; the unalloyed one of watching the pale face of little Miss Stubb, the typist, grow delicately pink and less dangerously thin, under the stimulus of good food; the amusement of congratulating Mrs. Banks, in public, on her new cook, and seeing Mrs. Banks, at the head of the supper table, nod her head with important secrecy.