“Ah, I thought so, from the careless way in which you were going to slip it into your pocket when we caught you in the conservatory. Why, my dear child, I have a set that I value very much—no finer than yours, though—diamonds and cat’s-eyes—and I sleep with them under my pillow, and even my maid doesn’t know where they are.”
I showed my astonishment.
“Believe me, when you travel about on a series of visits, as I am doing now, and are obliged to entrust your dressing-case to a careless maid, it is no unnecessary precaution.”
“But I shouldn’t take so much trouble with my paste pendant,” said I.
She shook her head at me, with a laugh, and said dryly—
“I should with such paste as yours.”
And then the gentlemen came in. One of them had brought from town that day a parcel of new waltzes, but the ladies all declined to play them until they had tried them over privately; and the gentlemen seemed so much disappointed that, having turned over the pages and seen that they were perfectly easy, I timidly offered my services. They were really pretty, and, after the difficult music I had had to read with Mr. Rayner, they were like child’s-play to me. When I had got to the end of the first, I received an ovation. The owner of the music was in ecstasies, and those who had begun to dance stopped and joined the rest in a chorus of admiration that made me quite ashamed of myself.
“Didn’t you know that I am a governess?” said I to one gentleman, laughing and blushing.
“Yes; but we thought you were only for show,” said Mrs. Clowes.
And I played the rest of the waltzes, and thought how much nicer it was to play for these people than for those I had met at Mrs. Manners’s tea-party. Then the gentleman they called Tom, whose name I had now found out to be Mr. Carruthers, led me away from the piano, saying I was not to be made a victim all the evening for other people’s amusement; and, telling a gentleman who was talking to me that he and I were going to have a serious conversation and were not to be disturbed, he took me to a deep window where there were seats, and gave me one, while he threw himself into another beside me.