Was there a note of alarm, of instinctive recoil, in that single interjection? I wondered. Mamma, who took but a monosyllabic part in the conversation, smiled continually, like one who could be suavely tolerant of most worldly idiosyncrasies; and Clarice herself had been, after all, a student in Paris. Still, I felt I could not leave the matter at that abrupt round full-stop.
“She is a—a sort of connexion,” I said, with a slight hesitation, “whom I am accompanying back to Paris at the request of my step-sister.”
I spoke somewhat nervously, incapable, on the spur of the moment, of the finessing which was needed at once to betray no secrets and to create no inextricable entanglements. To my surprise the girl responded with alacrity:—
“O, of course! I remember now. Your step-sister is a Miss Herold, is she not?”
I gave a little gasp and murmured an admission, marvelling what was to come.
“You will wonder how I know, perhaps,” said Miss Brooking. “It is rather curious, but it is always funnily occurring, that question of associations. She—your step-sister, I mean—governesses Josephine de Beaurepaire, doesn’t she?”
I answered, “Yes, in a way,” in a voice I strove not to make aghast.
“Well,” said the young lady, “I was engaged myself for a short time to give Josephine drawing lessons—cheek of me, wasn’t it?—and I heard before I left that Miss Herold was coming to be her companion. I can’t remember who it was told me; but somehow I learnt that it was your step-sister who was expected. Is she still there?”
“O, yes!” I sat up with a jerk, in the desperate hope to interpose my body between the speaker and her view of Fifine close by.
“I wonder how she likes it?” questioned the girl.