'A pudding? Then the rice shall be put in soak. Come along, little lady; and you, young man.' She caught up Pollie, and took Jimmy by the hand. 'Let's go and see mother put that rice in soak.' I hardly knew what to make of it. I didn't want to have a real lady in my little kitchen watching me make a small rice pudding. But she never gave me a chance to say so, she carried things off with such an air. She marched out of the room in front of me, Pollie in her arms, and Jimmy holding her hand. And, of course, like the little goose he was, he must lead her straight to where I didn't want him. So that there she was in the kitchen almost before I knew it. As I have said, I didn't know what to make of her at all--she did carry on in such a fashion, talking about all sorts of things at once; pretending to be interested in the pudding; playing such pranks with the children--they were in raptures. And she dressed that beautiful--a queen in her robes couldn't have looked better. Altogether she reminded me of Mr. FitzHoward the night before; playing, as it were, the fool, to hide what she was thinking of. Though what that was--or what she was doing in my house at all--was beyond me altogether. Just as she was at the height of her capers there came a knocking at the front door. 'There!' she cried. 'Now, mother, go and open the door, and I'll be nurse to the children. So, Mistress Mary, off you go.' And off I did go, feeling pretty muddled at being ordered about in my own house like that, and hoping to goodness that those two wouldn't spoil all her lovely things before she'd done with them. You can imagine my feelings--or, rather, nobody ever could, because they were beyond my own imagining--when, on opening the door, I saw, standing on the step, the Honourable Douglas Howarth. It isn't often I'd had visits from the gentry, but now they'd once started it seemed as if they were going to keep on. There was Miss Desmond, as she said her name was, helping me make a rice pudding--as if she herself had ever seen one made in all her life before!--and carrying on with my two youngsters in the kitchen, just as much at her ease, for all I could see, as if children and kitchens were what she always had been used to; and now, if I could believe my eyes, was an Earl's son, come, as it seemed, to keep her company. I hoped that he wouldn't want to lend a hand at the pudding too. CHAPTER XV THE NEW PEER: AND HIS MOTHER