as cook-general. There had been a succession of auxiliary servants who had never in any instance outstayed their month. The last of them had left precipitately, threatening a summons, to the scandal of the neighbours; but beyond that fact the matter had been hushed up, and even I only knew that Sarah was now practically single-handed through her coming to me about a charwoman. I thought I ought to see her at once, but Uvo detained me with an almost piteous face.

"Do wait a moment! Of course it's probably nothing at all; but you've given me an idea that certainly never crossed my mind before. I won't say you've put the fear of God on me, Gilly, but you have put me in rather a funk about old Nettleton! He is a rum 'un--I must admit it. If he should have done anything that could possibly be traced to ... all that.... I'll never open my mouth about it again.""Oh, bless your life, it's only more servant troubles," I reassured him. "I shouldn't wonder if old Sarah herself finds him more than she can stick. They do say he assaulted that last girl, so that she could hardly limp into her cab!" Uvo rolled his head on the pillow. "It wasn't an assault, Gilly. I know what happened to her. But I must know what's happened to old Sarah, or to Nettleton himself. Will you promise to come back and tell me?" "Certainly." "Then off you go, my dear fellow, and I'll hang on to my soul till you get back. You may have to go along with her, if he's been doing anything very mad. Take my key, and tell them downstairs not to lock you out." Sarah was waiting for me on the front-door mat, but she refused to make any communication before we left the house. She really was what she herself would have described as an elderly party, though it is doubtful whether even Sarah would have considered the epithet appropriate to her years. She certainly wore a rather jaunty bonnet on her walks abroad. It had a garish plume that nodded violently with her funny old head, and simply danced with mystery as she signified the utter impossibility of speech within reach of other ears. "I'm very sorry to trouble you, sir, very," said the old lady, as she trotted beside me up Mulcaster Park. "But I never did know such a thing to 'appen before, and I don't like it, sir, not at all I don't, I'm sure." "But what has happened, Sarah?" As a witness Sarah would not have been a success; she believed in beginning her story very far back, in following it into every by-way and blind alley of immaterial fact, in reporting every scrap of dialogue that she could remember or improvise, and in eschewing the oblique oration as an unworthy economy of time and breath. If interrupted, she would invariably answer a question that had not been asked, and on getting up to any 

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