“Shall I tell her that I’m sorry?” she asked Betty. “Or would that only make matters worse?”
Betty was afraid it would, and promised to explain herself, if Nora gave her an opening, which Nora did with a vengeance the minute Emily had gone off to hunt for a boarding-place and see her old friends.
“I’ll be going, when my week is up,” she announced briskly.
Betty stared. “Oh, Nora, you wouldn’t leave me—just when I need you most, too, to make the dinners go off splendidly, as I know you can. What’s the trouble?”
“I don’t think I’ll like taking orders from the new lady—I forget her name.”
“Why do you think that, Nora?” Betty threw out as a feeler.
“She’s not my idea of a lady, Miss Betty, if you’ll excuse me saying it out. I’m sorry to go an’ leave you in the lurch, Miss, but I should always be feeling bothered whenever she was by, and when you’re bothered you can’t do your work right. So this is a week’s notice, ma’am.”
In vain Betty explained that Emily had meant no harm by her imitation. In vain she argued, pleaded, coaxed, and scolded; Nora was firm. She had given her week’s notice, and in a week she would go.
Emily was “destroyed” in earnest when she heard the news; the feeling that she had repaid Betty’s kindness with careless trouble-making—or perhaps it was more the reaction from the strain of wondering what was ahead of her—combined with a bad cold to send her to bed for a few days. With all her helpers gone, Betty found it very hard to find time to hunt for a new waitress. In spite of alluring advertisements and diligent search by herself and her ever-faithful allies, Mary and Georgia, no substitute for Nora was forthcoming. But Belden-House-Annie, who had no sympathy whatever with her sister Nora’s “flighty ways,” had sent word by Lucile, who told Georgia, who told Betty, that she had heard of somebody who might do, and that the somebody aforesaid would come to see Betty that same afternoon.
So Betty sat waiting for her, watching the hands of the clock that went round much too fast, considering that the waitress did not come, until the door opened, and her hopes took a sudden bound and then dropped dead. It wasn’t a waitress. It was a gentleman. He looked like the kind who would think the tea was cold and the cakes stale, and he would very likely be right too. Nora had grown very careless since she had decided to leave. Betty fervently wished that he had not come, but she went forward, with her cordial little smile, to meet him, where he stood staring uncertainly around the room.