Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/229

230 What Jane said was: "Oh, I am so sorry. There's a looking-glass just behind you."

For Mrs. Rochester had put both hands up to her hat, which had been shaken from its exquisite calculated poise by the sudden and violent impact of Jane's little paw on the shoulder of the hat's wearer. Mrs. Rochester mechanically turned to the looking-glass, a pretty oval Empire thing in whose frame doves and cupids fought it out amid endless loops of carved and gilded ribbon.

"I am most frightfully sorry," Jane went on. "You must think I'm quite mad, but I'm not, really. I thought you were my friend, dressed up."

A silence. Mrs. Rochester's fingers were busy with the hat—elegant, half-diaphanous, lacy, with floating veil of grey and perfectly-placed pink and grey velvet pansies. Jane noticed this, and noticed anew the gilded birds and boys; also she noted in the mirror the pretty, faded, furious, powdered face of her visitor.

"Do please forgive me," said Jane again. "I thought it was my friend. She dressed up once before and pretended to be—to be a lady."

"Your friend is not a lady then?" was Mrs. Rochester's first word. Jane resisted the old Adam and went on meekly.

"I mean she pretended to be a strange lady come to call, I thought it was her again, dressed up."

"Do I look like a person dressed up and pretending to be a lady?" Mrs. Rochester asked, flashing the front view of her perfectly dressed self on the cringing Jane.

"You look absolutely lovely," said poor Jane quickly, "but I saw only the back of you; and I just thought how clever of Lucilla to get up like that—so different from the last time when she dressed up. She was dowdy and old then, and she quite took me in. I'd not the least idea it wasn't Lucilla."

"Your maid didn't tell you my name then?"

"Oh, she said something, but I didn't pay much attention, I was so sure it was Lucilla," said Jane, perceiving new pitfalls on every hand, and wondering whether she would be