“Oh, Nanny, what is it—that hole? Michael doesn’t like that hole.”
“There’s a milksop. Tut-tut! Frightened by a coal-cellar! Get on with you, do.”
Michael, holding tightly to the banisters, achieved the ground and was hustled into the twilight of the morning-room. Stella was fitted into her high chair; the circular tray was brought over from behind and thumped into its place with a click: Michael was lifted up and thumped down into another high chair and pushed close up to the table so that his knees were chafed by the sharp edge and his thighs pinched by a loose strand of cane. Nurse, blowing as usual through closed lips, cut up his meat, and dinner was carried through in an atmosphere of greens and fat and warm, milk-and-water and threats of Gregory-powder, if every bit were not eaten.
Presently the tramping of furniture-men was renewed and the morning-room, was made darker still by the arrival of a second van which pulled up at right angles to the first. In the course of dinner, Cook entered. She was a fat masculine creature who always kept her arms folded beneath a coarse and spotted apron; and after Cook came Annie the housemaid, tall and thin and anæmic. These two watched the children eating, while they gossiped with Nurse.
“Isn’t Mrs. Fane coming at all, then?” enquired Cook.
“For a few minutes—for a few minutes,” said Nurse quickly, and Michael would not have been so very suspicious had he not observed the nodding of her head long after there was any need to nod it.
“Is mother going to stay with us?” he asked.
“Stay? Stay? Of course she’ll stay. Stay for ever,” asserted Nurse in her bustling voice.
“Funny not to be here when the furniture came,” said Cook.
“Yes, wasn’t it?” echoed Annie. “It was funny. That’s what I thought. How funny, I thought.”