But to get on to the principal excitement of the afternoon--the utterly unlooked-for surprise that awaited me in the kitchen! The typically Welsh kitchen in this newly acquired place of Miss Million's is to me the nicest room in the house. I love its spaciousness and its slate floor, and the ponderous oak beams that bisect its smoke-blackened ceiling and are hung with bunches of dried herbs and with hams. I love its dresser, full of willow-pattern china, and its two big china dogs that face each other on the high mantelpiece. The row of bright brass candlesticks appeals to me, and the grandfather's clock, with the sun, moon, and stars on its face, and the smooth-scrubbed white deal kitchen-table pitted with tiny worm-holes, and the plants in the window, and everything about it. Miss Million declares she never saw such a kitchen "in all her puff." Putney was inconvenient enough, the dear knows, but the Putney kitchen was a joke to this one, where the kitchen range you can only describe "as a fair scandal," and nothing else! If she means to take the landlord's offer, later on, and to take this place as it stands, she's going to have everything pretty different. I should be sorry if she did; I like the place to be an utter anachronism in our utilitarian twentieth century, just as it is. I don't mind the honeycomb of draughts. I can put up with the soft, cave-like gloom of it---- It was this gloom that prevented me from seeing, at first, that there was anybody in the kitchen but cook, who was busily beating up batter for light cakes in a big, yellow, white-lined bowl. "Is the tea made?" I said. It was not; the silver teapot, with the tea in it, was being heated on the hob. I moved to take up the singing kettle. It was then that a tall man's form that had been sitting on a settle on the other side of the fire rose and came towards me. The red glow of the fire through the bars shone on the silver buttons and on the laurel-green cloth and on the high boots of a chauffeur's livery. Of course! This was the man who had driven over the people who had come in the car. But above the livery a voice spoke, a voice that I knew, a voice that I could hardly believe was speaking to me here. "Allow me," said this softly inflected Irish voice. And the kettle was gently but firmly taken out of my hand by the hand of--the Honourable James Burke. I gave such a start of surprise that it is a mercy I did not jolt against that kettle and send a stream of scalding hot water over the laurel-green-cloth-clad knees of the man before me. And I said exactly what people always say in meloramas when they are surprised at meeting anybody--thus showing that melodrama is not always so utterly unlike real life. I cried "You!"