"Her name's Nan Ellis," Madge informed the company gloomily, "and she's not much to look at, and not at all rich, and not much of anything that I can discover. Just a millstone round Miss Greta's neck."
"We mustn't say that." Miss Greta was winding the last couple of yards. "You see, she's an orphan, and I rather took her under my wing at school—poor child!"
Bobby asked if the American was going to stay with us.
"Oh, no," said the wool winder, now at the end of her task. "At the inn, of course." Miss Greta glanced again at the clock as she gathered up her knitting.
"Cart wasn't ordered till six," Madge threw in. "Don't you mean to bring her here at all?"
"I should be delighted. But—I can't flatter myself that my little friend would interest you." She swept the circle. "Quite a nice girl, but ..." (a deprecatory wave of one hand), "well, crude. Western, you know. She has grown used to looking to me for the summer. I tried to explain that—" the pause was eloquent of a delicate desire to spare feelings—"that I wasn't taking a holiday myself this year. But,"—on her way out of the hall Miss Greta laughed over her shoulder—"she's not perhaps so very quick at—how do you say it?—not so quick at the uptake." She turned at the sound of a motor car rushing up the drive.
Through the open lobby doors a girl was seen rising from her seat and scanning Kirklamont Hall with a slight frown. As the car swerved round to the entrance she called out to the chauffeur in a voice of appalling distinctness, and most unmistakably transatlantic: "Are you sure this is the place? It isn't my idea of a.... Oh!" She had given one glance through the lobby and was out of the car as a bird goes over a hedge. "It is! It is!"—The girl stood in the hall, holding out her hands, "Greta!"
"My dear Nan!" Miss von Schwarzenberg had hastened forward, more flurried than anybody there had ever seen her.
"Oh, my!" said the newcomer with a face of rapture. "Oh, my!" and she fell to hugging Miss von Schwarzenberg.
Bobby sat contorting his long legs and arms with unregenerate glee at Fräulein's struggle to be cordial and at the same time to disengage herself as rapidly as possible.