“Of course,” said Peter, “it may have been somebody she’d got to know quite well—say, at the restaurant, and she thought she was a nice lady and there’d be no harm in going to see her. Or the lady might have suggested taking her into good service. One never knows.”
“I think she’d have mentioned it in her letters if she’d talked to the lady much, my lord. It’s wonderful what a lot of things she’d find to tell me about the customers. And I don’t think she’d be for going into service again. We got real fed up with service, down in Leahampton.”
“Ah, yes. Now that brings us to quite a different point—the thing we wanted to ask you or your sister about before this sad accident took place. You were in service with this Miss Whittaker whom you mentioned just now. I wonder if you’d mind telling us just exactly why you left. It was a good place, I suppose?”
“Yes, my lord, quite a good place as places go, though of course a girl doesn’t get her freedom the way she does in a restaurant. And naturally there was a good deal of waiting on the old lady. Not as we minded that, for she was a very kind, good lady, and generous too.”
“But when she became so ill, I suppose Miss Whittaker managed everything, what?”
“Yes, my lord; but it wasn’t a hard place—lots of the girls envied us. Only Miss Whittaker was very particular.”
“Especially about the china, what?”
“Ah, they told you about that, then?”
“I told ’em, dearie,” put in Mrs. Gulliver. “I told ’em all about how you come to leave your place and go to London.”
“And it struck us,” put in Mr. Murbles, “that it was, shall we say, somewhat rash of Miss Whittaker to dismiss so competent and, if I may put it so, so well-spoken and personable a pair of maids on so trivial a pretext.”