Holding her between the iron knees, she put her large hand over her mouth. It was a hand large enough to cover more than her mouth. Only the panic-stricken eyes seemed to flare wide and lustrous above it.
“You’ll scream!” she said, “you’ll hammer on the floor with your heels! You’ll behave like a wildcat—you that’s been like a kitten! You’ve never done it before and you’ll never do it again! If it takes me three days, I’ll make you remember!”
And then her hand dropped—and her jaw dropped, and she sat staring with a furious, sick, white face at the open door—which she had shut as she came in. The top floor had always been so safe. The Nursery had been her own autocratic domain. There had been no human creature to whom it would have occurred to interfere. That was it. She had been actually safe.
Unheard in the midst of the struggle, the door had been opened without a knock. There on the threshold, as stiff as a ramrod, and with his hateful eyes uncovering their gleam, Lord Coombe was standing—no other than Lord Coombe.
Having a sharp working knowledge of her world, Andrews knew that it was all up. He had come upstairs deliberately. She knew what he had come for. He was as clever as he was bad, and he had seen something when he glanced at her in the drawing-room. Now he had heard and seen her as she dragged Robin from under the bed. He’d come up for that—for some queer evil reason of his own. The promptings of a remote gutter training made her feel a desire to use language such as she still had wisdom enough to restrain.
“You are a very great fool, young woman,” he said. “You have nothing but your character as a nurse to live on. A scene in a police court would ruin you. There is a Society which interferes with nursery torture.”
Robin, freed from the iron grasp, had slunk behind a chair. He was there again.
Andrews’ body, automatically responsive to rule and habit, rose from its seat and stood before this member of a class which required an upright position. She knew better than to attempt to excuse or explain. She had heard about the Society and she knew publicity would spell ruin and starvation. She had got herself into an appalling mess. Being caught—there you were. But that this evil-reputationed swell should actually have been awakened by some whim to notice and follow her up was “past her,” as she would have put it.
“You were going to pinch her—by instalments, I suppose,” he said. “You inferred that it might last three days. When she said you would—in the drawing-room—it occurred to me to look into it. What are your wages?”
“Thirty pounds a year, my lord.”