In two minutes’ time I was being helped into a taxi by the august hand of our Governor himself.
I lifted my head and looked straight up at the landing window. Yes, there they were, all three of them, flattening their noses against the pane. I nodded and smiled with bravado. My three colleagues were too utterly taken by surprise to even smile back at me. The expression on their three faces was even more pronounced than as I had foreseen it. Miss Holt was standing in front, and as we drove away I saw her eyebrows rise to her netted hair, while her mouth dropped open.
I could almost hear the gasp that came from it, of:
“Girls! Did you ever? She really is!—with Still Waters! Well! What ever next?”
CHAPTER V
THE FIRST LUNCH TOGETHER
“To the Carlton,” ordered Mr. Waters; and off we drove.
I hadn’t been inside the Carlton since the days before the “smash”—the days when I was a young lady of leisure, without an idea that I should presently be toiling in the grimy typists’ room at the Near Oriental from nine o’clock until six, wearing home-made delaine shirts, and trembling lest I might lose my hard-earned twenty-five shillings a week!
The last time I’d been taken there to tea, after a matinée, by my brother Jack and Sydney Vandeleur, who had ordered roses of a very special pink to match the frock I’d worn then, and had sent a message to the band to play my favourite waltzes. Yes, as Jack said, Sydney would do anything for me, always. I expect Jack thought that the hundred pounds which saved his name came, as he suggested, from the Vandeleurs. Well, I couldn’t possibly “give away” the truth about the anomalous position his sister accepted in order to earn the money!