Page:Delight - de la Roche - 1926.djvu/45

 pleased with her. She liked her better than Delight, whom she suspected of being "worth watching."

It was eight o'clock before she was able to go to her bedroom. Mrs. Bye was in her room next door putting Queenie to bed. May could hear the child's little voice piping—

She heard Mrs. Bye say: "Now, Lovey, hop straight in and go bye-bye."

She could picture Queenie hopping on to her mattress on the floor in the corner of the room next the stovepipe. For a moment the vision of Albert was gone, she breathed more easily. Then it danced before her again in the lamplight and her heart began to pound in her throat. Hastily she pulled off her working dress and put on a blue one of cheap silk, with a velvet girdle and a lace collar fastened by a gilt bar pin on which two little gilt birds perched, one of Albert's presents. She put on high-heeled shoes that hurt her, and back-combed the hair about her ears till it framed her frightened face like a fabulous halo.

She turned out the light and crept down the backstairs. The kitchen was empty save for old Davy who was poring over the pages of "The Family Herald," moving his grey unshaven lips as he read some tale of high life. The other girls were in the scullery. Annie and Pearl were wrestling like two boys while Delight sat perched on a table clapping her hands and singing an old Somerset Fair song she had from her Granny.

May stole into the dining-room, and passed from there into the narrow cupboard behind the bar. It was pitch-dark there except for the golden square of the frosted