Chapter III

While Mrs. Otway had been thinking over the
now rather painful problem of her good old
Anna, the subject of her meditations, that is Anna
herself, from behind the pretty muslin curtain which
hid her kitchen from the passers-by, was peeping out
anxiously on the lawn-like stretch of green grass,
bordered on two sides by high elms, which is so
pleasant a feature of Witanbury Close.

Her knitting was in her hands, for Anna's fingers
were never idle, but just now the needles were still.

When your kitchen happens to be one of the best
rooms on the ground floor, and one commanding not
only the gate of your domain but the road beyond, it
becomes important that it should not be quite like
other people's kitchens. It was Mrs. Otway's pride,
as well as Anna's, that at any moment of the day a
visitor who, after walking into the hall, opened by
mistake the kitchen door, would have found everything
there in exquisite order. The shelves, indeed,
were worth going some way to see, for each shelf was
edged with a beautiful "Kante" or border of crochet-work
almost as fine as point lace. In fact, the kitchen
of the Trellis House was more like a stage kitchen
than a kitchen in an ordinary house, and the way in
which it was kept was the more meritorious inasmuch
as Anna, even now, when she had become an old
woman, would have nothing of what is in England
called "help." She had no wish to see a charwoman

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