New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1913
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1907,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1907.
Reprinted March, 1910; March, 1912; August, 1913.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
THE CONVERT
CHAPTER I
The tall young lady who arrived fifteen minutes before the Freddy Tunbridges' dinner-hour, was not taken into the great empty drawing-room, but, as though she were not to be of the party expected that night, straight upstairs she went behind the footman, and then up more stairs behind a maid. The smart, white-capped domestic paused, and her floating muslin streamers cut short their aërial gyrations subsiding against her straight black back as she knocked at the night-nursery door. It was opened by a middle-aged head nurse of impressive demeanour. She stood there an instant eyeing the intruder with the kind of overbearing hauteur that in these days does duty as the peculiar hall-mark of the upper servant, being seldom encountered in England among even the older generation of the so-called governing class.
'It's too late to see the baby, miss. He's asleep.'
'Yes, I know; but the others are expecting me, aren't they?'