When Meg came in she was struggling with Carlyle, fingers at ears to keep him quite apart from the object lesson on Ants which Miss Monson was delivering to Poppet and Peter. In the afternoon she practised for two consecutive hours, not waltzes and scraps from the “Mikado” and “Gondoliers” and “Paul Jones” as usual, but Plaidy’s technical studies and Czerny’s Velocity Exercises and a fugue from Bach.
At night she took out a quantity of red wool that she found in a box, and began to crochet a petticoat for an old woman who lived in a tumble-down bark hut near the river, and had the reputation of being mother of two bushrangers who had been shot, sister to a famous murderer, and daughter of one of the early Botany Bay convicts.
But of course such an abnormal state of goodness [220] ]could not be expected to continue uninterruptedly, at any rate in its early days. In less than a fortnight the silver pen made its reappearance, and violet ink crept back into one of the bottles. The crochet needle was slipped out of the sixth row of the petticoat and made to work fleecy white wool up into that pretty style of head wrap known as a “fascinator.”
“Oh, I didn’t do anything so very dreadful, after all,” she said to herself, with the blunted memory of ten days. “Dear old Meg is always a little inclined to make mountains out of molehills.”
At first there had been a little real fright mixed with the thought of the dinner-party. Five days after it was over, she was in at the chemist’s spending eighteenpence of her allowance on a sweet little bottle of scent for Meg.
And one of the grooms from Trafalgar House came in with a prescription.
“The old lady’s pretty bad,” he said, in answer to a question of the chemist that Nell had not caught, “and two more of the maids are down.”
Nellie lingered a few minutes, counted her change several times, examined the nail and tooth-brushes displayed in a glass case, and read an advertisement setting forth the merits of somebody’s pills.
The man said he would call back for the medicine [221] ]in half an hour, and departed. Then she went back to the counter.
“Is it Mrs. Fitzroy-Browne who is ill?” she asked, remembering with a pang the poor old woman’s wistful “I just wish you was my little girl!”