Mrs Thornton gazed up at the beaming face with disapproving eyes. Without an answering smile she noted the woman’s flame-coloured cotton blouse, some six times wider at the waist than at the neck, then at the dark blue print skirt, and finally at the bare flat feet. At first the feet were stolid, immobile. Then at the continued steady gaze the toes began to twitch, and at last under the pitiless silent stare one foot began lightly to rub the other.

When Mrs Thornton again looked up, the gin’s eyes were rolling in their sockets, whilst the beaming smile had vanished.

“Martha, where are your slippers?” asked her mistress severely.

“Missy, I dunno,” Martha gasped. “Themslippers got bushed.”

“For twenty years, Martha, have I tried to encase your feet in footwear,” Mrs Thornton said softly, but with a peculiar grimness of tone. “I have bought you boots, shoes and slippers. I shall be very angry with you, Martha, if you do not at once find your slippers and put them on. If they are bushed, go and track them.”

“Suttinly, missy. Metrack um to hell,” came the solemn assurance. Then, bending over her mistress with surprising quickness in one of her avoirdupois, she added in a thrilling whisper:

“King Henry! Hecome back to Barrakee. You ’member King Henry?”

For fully thirty seconds brown eyes bored into black without a blink. The white woman was about to say something when the sound of a wicket-gate beingclosed announced the approach of her husband. The gin straightenedherself and rumbled back to her kitchen.

Almost subconsciously the mistress of Barrakee heard her husband banteringly reprove Martha for the nakedness of her understandings, heard the woman’s mumbled excuses, and with an effort of will regained her composure. She was pouring tea when Mr Thornton seated himself beside her.