But she smiled at him as if she was listening to it all for the first time.
“What a wonderful butler you have been, Bates,” she exclaimed. “No one else could have managed as you did single-handed and kept the dining room looking so spic and span and no one realised when they came to the house that we were so understaffed.”
“I really did my best,” Bates answered. “But now her Ladyship says I can have as many in the dining room and the kitchen as may be needed and his Lordship’ll soon make the house just as good as it were when he was a little boy.”
He spoke as though it was something that affected him personally.
Julia knew, because he was such a good servant, that he had been involved by their troubles as if they had been his own.
“All I can say now, Bates,” she said, “is that if he
