Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/230

Rh forced into downright lying. "Do please try to forgive me—I do hope I didn't hurt you. I feel like a bull in a china-shop when I think Oh, how could I? Do sit down and try to forgive me for being such a blundering idiot."

Perhaps Mrs. Rochester was softened by Jane's appeals. Perhaps the wisdom of the dove had not quite deserted Miss Quested in this her hour of need. Perhaps John Rochester's mother felt that in this clumsy behaving, as the hoyden herself admitted, like a bull in a china-shop, Miss Antrobus had not the serious rival she had feared. This girl at any rate was no siren—just a blowsy, blundering schoolgirl.

However it may have been, Mrs. Rochester smiled—a neat, mechanical smile performed by the lips alone, wholly unassisted by the eyes—and said:

"Please don't apologise any more. I quite understand. Just a youthful frolic."

She seated herself with a perfect grace, and Jane, standing before her, felt like a whipped puppy.

"Do sit down too, won't you?" said the lady in grey silk and violet embroideries, and Jane sat. Her frock was crumpled and crushed from the hammock and her hair in a pigtail. She looked about fourteen. No—certainly not a siren.

"You must wonder at my descending on you in this way," Mrs. Rochester went on, but your friend Lady Hesketh—we were neighbours in the country—wrote to me that you were—that you were desirous of entertaining paying guests. Yes?"

"Yes," said Jane, wishing that her hands were clean, or, alternatively, that she had never been born. "I asked Emmie to ask everyone she knew—Emmie—Lady Hesketh, you know."

"Oh yes," said Mrs. Rochester, looking about her through the most impertinent tortoiseshell-framed lorgnettes. "What a charming old-world place this is, is it not?"

"Yes," said Jane, rendering heartfelt tribute to Lucilla's