Mrs. Bagot laughed. “Of course I have a kitchen,” she said. “It is a very good little house, very well built. The kitchen is at the end of the hall outside where you came in. You go three steps down to the kitchen. Then there are the two rooms upstairs, over these two rooms, and partway up the stairs there is a half landing, with the bathroom, and next to the bathroom a very small room. We call it the boxroom. It has a nice window looking out on the garden.”

Mrs. Bagot’s husband slept alone in the boxroom, but she wasn’t going to tell that to the Bishop or to anybody else. The Bishop nodded at her, and then he asked the question he had been waiting to ask ever since he walked into the house. “You have the whole house to yourselves then?” he said, meaning that Mrs. Bagot was not obliged to share her house with lodgers.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and then she said quickly, “We own the house outright. We have enough.”

“It’s what I thought,” the Bishop said, “but I’m glad you tell me. You have a good man then, a good protector.”