Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/214

Rh name?'—she acted all right too, except for giggling—I could think of nothing but Rochester. I thought you'd see through me directly. It was Gladys who thought of pulling down the blinds. I never expected to say more than, 'How do you do?' before you recognised me. I couldn't have kept it up much longer. I couldn't think of anything to say."

"You thought of a good deal."

"Oh, that wash!" said Lucilla, throwing back her hair. And Jane felt somehow solaced.

"But what was it that gave me away?" Lucilla asked.

"'My son John,'" Jane told her. "He told me one day that his mother always calls him Jack. I gather that she thinks John rather—what's the word—roturier. So then I knew something was up, and in a flash I saw that you weren't real. Do you know, that was a horrid moment, when you began to come to pieces in my hands. I almost expected you to be nothing but clothes, like that ghastly nun in 'Villette.'" "I rather expected to be torn to bits myself," said Lucilla. "You were violent, Jane." "What did you expect?"

"'Though she is little, she is very fierce.' Well, it was a good rag," said Lucilla contentedly; "only my head doesn't feel quite safe on my shoulders yet."

"I think I was very moderate," said Jane.

Next day the cooks came, but none of them suited Mrs. Doveton.

"I shouldn't care to trust e'er a one of them to do for you," she said, and a wonderful tremulous hope sprang up in the breasts of the girls that perhaps Mrs. Doveton herself, always so averse from responsibility, and now so delicately placed as the arbiter of their domestic destiny, might find herself unable to take upon herself the burden of decision; that she might, in fact, rather than risk the selection of an Unsuitable, continue to "do for" them herself.

The paying guests whose letters had been approved,