Miss Fortescue agreed: “Oh, of course!” glad to find this symptom of dawning sanity in their most incompetent landlady. “Will you show me my room, please,” she added firmly.
“I suppose you’d better have this one,” said Aureole, very reluctant. “It’s meant for two, ...” she pondered the matter, gazing absently at Sebastian; who, uncertain of the exact plight into which the advertised “Bohemian lines” were about to plunge him, again reiterated his plaintive request for a single room.
Then Aureole dived into her bag, and brought forth a crumpled sheet of paper, which, opened out, proved to be a blend between a map of the house, a time-table, and a fever-chart.
“Let me see: Miss Bruce is leaving on the twenty-second, but Mr. Vyvyan Leclerc comes in on the twenty-first to take her room, so that won’t do.”
Quite obviously it would not do, in more senses than one.
Aureole continued poring over the much-bescribbled, much-erased paper:
“The dairy room is empty for three days; the Lloyds left in a temper over the breakfasts. You could start there, Mr. Levi. And then perhaps for a week or two I could get you a room in a cottage near by—only ten minutes’ walk. And after that, little Verney is away for a week-end; he wouldn’t mind if you slept in his bed as long as you don’t disturb his moralities.”
“His—what?” from Sebastian. The prim girl turned pink.
“His morality plays. He’s mad about them; and has a cardboard model fixed up, with all the puppet characters.—That would bring us to about the beginning of September, wouldn’t it? Oh, well, somebody is sure by then to have lost patience with me, and quitted, and left a room vacant. So that’s all right, isn’t it?” and she raised wistful brown velvet eyes to Sebastian, who replied gravely: