At last the Hog's Back rose, and at a little inn, known for its comfort--and its _chef_--Hillyard's car was stopped.
"Mrs.Croyle ?" Hillyard asked at the office.
"Her maid is here," said the girl clerk, and pointed.
Hillyard turned to a girl, pretty and, by a few years, younger than Stella Croyle.
"I have orders not to wake Mrs.Croyle until she rings," said the maid.
Jenny Prask, she was called, and she spoke with just a touch of pleasant Sussex drawl.

"Mrs.Croyle has not been sleeping well, and she looked for a good night's rest in country air." The maid was so healthful in her appearance, so reasonable in her argument, that Hillyard's terrors, fostered by solitude, began to lose their vivid colours.
"I understand that," he stammered.

"Yet, Jenny----" Jenny Prask smiled.
"You are Mr.Hillyard, I think ?" "Yes." "I have heard my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them.

Here, it seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly Stella Croyle's maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the recognition of a mistress.
"If you wish, I will wake her." Jenny Prask went up the stairs, Hillyard at her heels.

She knocked upon the door.