Phœbe drew up her head, and tightened her lips to answer:
“Ladies like my mistress have calls upon them people like us can’t understand. The colonel’s uncle has just died, and left him the title and heaps of money into the bargain; so, of course, there’s a good deal to do.”
“Of course!” repeated Miss Smith, with an air of conviction; “only it’s so odd her ladyship didn’t take you.”
“Not at all—I wasn’t wanted. I dare say the colonel sent for her in a hurry, and she got too flurried to know what she was about.”
“But—well, it’s no affair of mine,” observed Miss Smith; “but I should be sorry to see a fellow creature took in. Living in a hotel one sees a good deal of life, and there’s often people coming here who pretend to be very fine, and aren’t any better than I am, after all.”
It was the obliging waiter’s desertion that prompted this insinuation; but Phœbe never guessed that her own bright eyes were at the bottom of the scandal, and drew herself up with great dignity.
“I am not one of those who take people on trust,” she said, with her nose well en l’air. “If her ladyship had not been what she pretended, she wouldn’t have been troubled with my services. I have never had anything but good places yet, and have no fancy for coming down in the world.”
So saying, Phœbe withdrew to her own apartment, feeling that she had had the best of it, on the whole; and, after visiting Lady Gwendolyn’s room to see if by any chance she had returned as mysteriously as she had departed, she went to bed, and slept undisturbed until the morning.
CHAPTER XXII.
CONVICTION.