Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/216

Rh voices joined it. Jane ran through to the window of one of the unoccupied rooms that looked over the cedar lawn. Lucilla was crossing it in the company of a very elegant looking young woman and two young men, who, if not exactly elegant, were certainly presentable. They disappeared beyond the lawn, and Jane hurried back to her room to do her hair and go down to meet the strangers.

"Why," she told herself, "they look quite nice—not like P.G.'s—like real people!"

And she hastened to exchange the kimono for a frock and her gold-embroidered slippers for sedate suède shoes. But before she had come to the shoes Lucilla burst in upon her.

"Oh, my dear!" she said. "Such luck! They've taken the rooms—the three best bedrooms and a sitting-room; we can easily turn one of the bedrooms into a sitting-room, and that attic where the cistern is for a dark-room. They go in for photography. They're going to have a tap and sink put in. They pay for it! They're musicians too: they play at concerts. They're going to pay three guineas a week each, and three for the sitting-room, and two for the dark-room—that's fourteen guineas a week, my girl!"

"We'll have to be a bit more careful about their references,—a bit more careful than last,time, I mean."

"They've given me three—a clergyman, and their last landlord, and their bank."

"We must call on these references. Where have they been living?"

"In Carlisle."

"That's convenient." "Ah, but their bank's in Lombard Street, and we'll go and call on that. No writing. We'll see with our own eyes whether Barclay's Bank is a real bank. Oh, Jane, what luck!" "They're nice, then?"

"I should jolly well think so. Why, Jane, they're not a bit like P.G.'s. They're just like people you know."

"And Mr. Tombs—what about him?"