The door opened, and a dainty mulatto boy, with livery buttons, and a white handkerchief visible at a side-pocket, presented himself.
“Mrs. Judson? couldn’t say; better go down to the basement. That’s the sort of thing for serving-people, and folks that come with bundles; couldn’t take it upon me to answer a single question here,” he said.
The girl advanced quietly into the hall, and sat down, with the light of a tinted lantern overhead falling directly upon her.
In spite of her little straw bonnet and plaided blanket-shawl, the boy discovered something in her air, and the pure loveliness of her features, that checked his rising impertinence.
“Go tell your mistress that Miss —— no, that her niece wishes to speak with her.”
The boy paused to take a survey of her person, and went down the hall, smiling till his white teeth shone again.
“Perhaps it’s a lie, and perhaps it isn’t—who knows,” he muttered, threading his way up the flight of stairs set aside for menials. “But won’t she catch it for claiming relationship, true or not?—well, I shouldn’t wonder.”
The greatest trial that can be inflicted on an ardent nature is that of waiting. When the mulatto came back, he found the young person who had excited his curiosity, with a flush in her cheeks, eagerly watching his approach.
“You may go up to Mrs. Judson’s room,” he said, and muttering to himself, he added, “and much good it’ll do you.”
The girl was about to mount the richly carpeted steps that swept down between those curving rosewood balusters like a sloping bed of moss mottled with forest-flowers, but the mulatto interfered.