“It’s for you to please yourself, Miss,” said Betty stiffly.
“Of course it would be an immense advantage to the girl to be under a competent servant like yourself, for although she’s intelligent she has never been in service before. Miss Pennie was very much interested in her,” added Miss Unity as an afterthought.
If Betty had a soft corner in her heart for anyone but her mistress it was for Pennie. She did not at all approve of Miss Unity’s taking up with these new fancies, but to please Pennie she would put up with a good deal. It was with something approaching a smile that she said:
“Oh, then, it’s the little girl out of Anchor and Hope Alley, isn’t it, Miss? Her as Miss Pennie made the clothes for and used to call Kettles?”
“Well,” said Miss Unity reluctantly, “I am sorry to say she does live there, but Mrs Margetts knows her mother well, and she’s a very deserving woman. We sha’n’t call the girl Kettles—her name is Keturah. You’ll have to teach her, you know, Betty,” she added apologetically.
As to that, Betty had no objection. She had a deal rather, she said, have a girl who knew nothing and was willing to learn, than one who had got into wrong ways and had to be got out of them. In short, she was quite ready to look with favour on the idea, and to Miss Unity’s great surprise it was settled without further difficulty that Kettles was to come on trial.
With her usual timidity, however, she now began to see the other side of the question, and to be haunted by all sorts of misgivings. When she woke in the middle of the night dreadful pictures presented themselves of Kettles’ father stealing upstairs with a poker in his hand in search of the plate-basket. She could hear the dean saying when the theft was discovered:
“Well, Miss Unity, what can you expect if you will have people in your house out of Anchor and Hope Alley?”
It would no doubt be a dreadful risk, and before she went to sleep again she had almost decided to give up the plan altogether. But morning brought more courage, and when she found Betty ready to propose that the girl should come that very day she could not draw back.
“I can soon run her up a cotton frock, and she can have one of my aprons, and there’s all her other clothes nice and ready,” said Betty in a business-like tone.