She was not certain, but she thought the passing figure had looked like Mrs. Shiffney's. The door of Mullion House stood open, held by a thin woman with very large gray eyes, who smiled at Mrs. Mansfield and made a slight motion, almost as if she mentally dropped a curtsey, but physically refrained out of respect for London ways. "Oh, yes, ma'am, he is in! He's expecting you." The emphasis on the last word was marked. Mrs. Mansfield looked at this woman, toward whom at once she felt friendly. "There's some here and there that would bother him to death, I'm sure, if they was let!" continued the woman, closing the little front door gently. "But it will be a pleasure to him to see you. We all knows that!" "I'm very glad to hear it!" responded Mrs. Mansfield, liking this unconventional but very human servant. "Mr. Heath has spoken of my coming, then?" "I should think so, ma'am. This way, if you please!" Mrs. Searle, Heath's cook-housekeeper, crossed the little dimly lit hall and walked quickly down a rather long and narrow passage. "He's in the studio, ma'am," she remarked over her narrow shoulder, sharply turning her head. "Fan is with him." "Who's Fan? A dog?" "My little girl, ma'am." "Oh, I beg your pardon!" "Not knowing you were there, when the other lady went I sends her in to him for company as he wasn't working. 'Run, Fan!' says I. 'Go and cheer Mr. Heath up, there's a good girl!' I says. I knows very well there's nothing like a child to put you right after you've been worried. They're so simple, aren't they, ma'am? And we're all simple, I b'lieve, at 'eart, though we're ashamed to show it. I'm sure I don't know why!" As she concluded she opened a door and ushered Mrs. Mansfield into the composer's workroom. At the far end of it, in a flicker of firelight, Mrs. Mansfield saw him stooping down over a very fair and Saxon-looking child of perhaps three years old, whose head was thickly covered with short yellow hair inclined to be curly, and who was dressed in a white frock with an almost artful blue bow in the front. As Mrs. Mansfield came in the child was holding up to Heath a small naked doll of a rather blurred appearance, and was uttering some explanatory remarks in the uneven but arresting voice that seems peculiar to childhood. "Mrs. Mansfield, if you please, sir!" said Mrs. Searle. Then, with a change of voice: "Come along, Fan! And bring Masterman with you, there's a good girl! We must get on his clothes or he'll catch cold." (To Mrs. Mansfield.) "You'll excuse her, ma'am, but she's that nat'ral, clothes or no clothes it's all one to her."