"Hush!" cried Letitia, for at that moment Mrs. Potzenheimer came in to tell us that dinner was served. Most aged and infirm was Mrs. Potzenheimer, and I looked at her in amazement. She was slightly lame and her face was wizened and pinched. Her eyes filled with tears as she told us that dinner was ready. I had felt ravenously hungry, but the sight of the new domestic nipped my pangs. Not being wholly bad, a feeling of compassion took possession of me. A horrid idea that I should be waiting on cook, instead of cook waiting on me, almost overwhelmed me. Our places were laid, but the table had no other decoration than a bottle of Worcestershire sauce on a little mat in the middle. Never have I seen a bottle of Worcestershire look so funereally lonely. Robinson Crusoe on his desert island was a crowd in comparison. We sat down, depressed and gloomy. I felt that like the dove on the mast--in the song--I must "mourn, and mourn, and mourn." "I wonder if this table decoration is a duplicate of Mrs. Vanderbilt's," I murmured, as I unfolded my table-napkin. "It _is_ strange," Letitia agreed, in a whisper. "I can't understand why she has 'starred' the Worcestershire sauce. It is really such an ugly thing, with the brick-red label and the crude stopper." "Perhaps there are some tenement-house Vanderbilts," I suggested moodily. "I told you, Archie," Letitia insisted, "that the Mrs. Vanderbilt who employed Nellie is at present visiting the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim Castle, so that settles it. She particularly said Blenheim Castle." Mrs. Potzenheimer brought in a seething dish of mutton stew, that emitted a fragrant odor. She set it down with a heavy sigh. I noticed a tear trickling down her cheek, and so did Letitia, for I saw my wife's face grow serious. It was very good stew, indeed. If we could have called it a _ragoût_, we should have felt more at ease. It was a stew, however, and, with the best of intentions, it was impossible even to think of it as anything else. "She is much older than you implied, Letitia," I said, as cook limped out of the room and we began dinner. "She really seems positively decrepit." Letitia sat looking at her food rather wistfully. "It is the electric light, I think," she whispered--the constant whispering made me nervous--"I admit, Archie, that she looks twenty years older, lighted up. In the daytime I put her down as forty. But you know, dear, I engaged her in such a hurry that I couldn't be quite sure. It does seem cruel to allow such an old woman--" "Well, dear,"--I was growing cheerful in the material comfort of the moment,--"we don't force her to do it. She evidently wanted a position, or you wouldn't have found her at the intelligence office." "She was crying when she brought in the stew." Letitia's lip quivered ominously.