“Wha’ll I say?” said the servant girl, so decidedly bearing that aspect that she could not have been called the maid, or the servant, or anything but the girl. She was wiping her hands with her apron to be ready to take a card, and a cap had been stuck on rather at random upon a mass of curly and not very well-tended hair. “You can say it’s a gentleman to speak to Mrs. Brown,” said Rowland, stepping into the parlour, which was rather dark with its flowers banked up against the window, though the flowers themselves seemed to flourish luxuriantly. There was something horribly familiar to him in the aspect of the room. He had seen nothing like it for many years, and yet he recognised it in a moment. It was the best room of the respectable mechanic--the parlour in which his wife put all her pride. There was a round stand, covered with a glass shade, of wax flowers in the centre of the table, and it stood upon a still larger mat surrounded with raised flowers worked in crochet in coloured wools standing primly up around. There were a few books laid round like the rays of a star: the _Course of Time_ and other grimly orthodox productions of that character. The chairs and sofa were covered with long “antimacassars,” also worked in wool in stripes of different colours; the mantelpiece was loaded with small pieces of china--girls with lambs, jugs with little pictures upon them, and other such impressive articles, and photographs. Hung over it in the place of honour, Mr. Rowland shivered to see his own portrait, flanked on one side by the picture of a bungalow in which he had once lived, and on the other by a group of football players, with names written underneath, one of them being conspicuously marked as “Archie.” Rowland, however, was breathing too quickly to allow him to go up to it, and prepare himself for the appearance of his son. He felt more like running away, and keeping up a fiction of being in India still. While he was looking round him in consternation and alarm, he was suddenly aware that the door had opened, and a little bright figure in coloured muslin and many floating ribbons had come in. She twisted herself as she walked, with a swaying and movement of all the bright-coloured ribbons, and came forward with an apparent intention of shaking hands with the stranger. But stopping at the distance of a step or two, said with another twist, “Oh, I thought I knew you! Was there anything you might be wanting that I could do?” “I am waiting to see Mrs. Brown,” he said.