“Not me,” was the slow, sad answer, accompanied by a furtively wiped tear. “Not mothers as ain’t been learned grammar proper when they was young. Them’s the kind of mothers as had oughter die afore their boys and girls are growed up.”
Then the gentlemen came in, and there was a [205] ]louder buzz of talk, a new settlement of chairs, and presently some excessively noisy music.
“I’m just goin’ to get something for my ’ed, it aches so bad,” Mrs. Browne whispered to Nellie after a time; “they won’t notice if I slip out when Miss ’Udson goes to the pianee.”
Nellie lifted eager eyes. “Let me come with you,—oh, please!” she said impulsively, and the next minute the two were stealing out of the nearest door together.
In the dimly-lighted bedroom the old lady gave way altogether, and sobbed for a long time in a heartbroken way, much to Nellie’s distress.
“Oh, I wish I was dead, I do—I wish I was dead!” she said, with a little rocking movement to ease the sorrow of her poor old heart. She mopped at her eyes occasionally with her lace-trimmed handkerchief; in olden days she would have put her apron over her head and shed her tears behind its screen; but even that solace was denied her now.
Nell found eau-de-Cologne on the dressing-table, and insisted on bathing her head with it, and then fanning slowly with a palm leaf till the poor thing’s agitation calmed and the burning head was a little cooler.
“I think I’ve let things worrit me too much to-day,” was her faltering excuse when, half an hour [206] ]later, she awoke to the fact that Nellie was still fanning her; “but no one knows what my poor ’ed ’as been lately. Marthy the parlour-maid was sick last night, poor thing, and I sat with her till near two; and James the other footman begged me to let ’im go off—they said ’is little girl was bad with scarlet-fever. I ’ad to let ’im, of course, and you could see ’ow vexed Pa was when we was short-’anded at table. It worrited me awful.”
There was a rustle of silken skirts along the corridor, and a patter of high-heeled shoes. Isabel had suddenly missed her young guest, whose eyes she had so wanted to dazzle; it struck her with infinite vexation that it was more than probable she was with her mother, despising her hugely for her ungrammatical language and many banalities.
“Well, really!” she said, sweeping into the bedroom, and looking vexedly at the two on the sofa.