Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/215

216 and who had been asked to call, did call. Lucilla interviewed them.

"It's the least you can do," said Jane. "I couldn't face a caller now; I should be afraid it would turn out to be you." "But I shall be there with you, you know."

"So you say," said Jane darkly. "I'm not going to risk it. You're capable of being yourself and someone else at the same time. You're quite equivalent, as Gladys would say. I shall sit in our boudoir and boud—or read. And I shall wash my hair. So that it won't be any use your sending Forbes up to say that, 'Please 'm, Miss Craye would like to speak to you a moment in the drawing-room.' My hair will be wringing wet the whole time they're here."

When it came to the point, Jane did not wash her hair, because a four at tennis had been arranged to take place directly after tea; but she sat with the hair thoroughly down over a kimono with storks on it, and, thus defended, heard three times the resonant ringing voice of the front-door bell, announcing, "There are strangers on your doorstep, who don't know how I reverberate and clang, and how I keep it up unless you ring me very, very gently." But only twice did she hear the tinkle of the drawing-room bell—a mincing tinkle, reminding one of the voice of the false Mrs. Rochester, and saying, "There are visitors being shown out of your high-class family mansion by your irreproachable, white-aproned, long-streamer-capped parlourmaid."

By a simple arithmetical process she was being led to conjecture that one of the callers might have had to ring twice—though Forbes was so very irreproachable that this was not likely—when she heard Lucilla's voice in the hall, the voice of one pleasantly elated in the company of congenial spirits.

"No trouble at all," she was saying; "of course I'll go with you to the gate." And then, "And wouldn't you like to go round the garden?"

A woman's pleasant voice answered her, and men's