"I beg your pardon, Sister Jael, I'm sure I do. Sorry I spoke in 'aste; I was forgetting to jidge not so I be not jidged. Maybe you're asking a few old friends up to meet him?"
"Maybe fiddlesticks."
Miss Salvation groaned aloud with envy and disappointment. If one considers the disproportionate pleasure an invitation would have given, Aunt Jael may be judged mean in her refusal. On the other hand, poor Lord Tawborough!
My interest in the visitor was greater than Aunt Jael's, less snobbish and more dramatic. He would be the first of my father's relatives I had ever met: he figured in the sacred story of my mother. I pictured a hundred times what he would be like; young, grand and impressive. He would wear a coronet and carry a golden pole with ribbons floating from the top.
At the last moment my chief attention shifted from the visitor to myself: from considering what he would look like to what I should look like to him. He was to arrive by carriage, he said. Aunt Jael was to bow him into the famous front-room, swept and garnished for the occasion, offer him a chair, a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and hustle him off to Meeting. This was Aunt Jael's program. Mine was quite as carefully worked out. I decided to stay upstairs in my bedroom till he came, watching his arrival from my window, retiring so that he could not catch a glimpse of me, and not descending till Aunt Jael began to shout for me. Then I would go downstairs, ready dressed for Meeting. The advantages were: first I looked best with my bonnet on, as it concealed my scraggy and unalluring hair; second, I should have seen him before he saw me, always a strategic advantage; third, he would see me last, after he had had time to absorb the lesser charms of Grandmother and Aunt Jael—even so does the leading lady fail to appear till you have made the acquaintance of the lesser stars.
I made one eleventh-hour alteration. As I heard carriage-wheels coming up the Lawn path, I decided, with impulsive generosity, not to peep at him. It would be taking an unfair advantage: I would let him burst on me at the same moment as I on him. To avoid temptation I ran away from the window. I was specially excited. Now for some of Aunt Jael's snobbery. A lord!
Grandmother was calling me, "Child, child!"
Begloved, bonnetted, Bibled, I went downstairs. As I approached the half-open parlour door, I heard Aunt Jael expounding my "usual" unpunctuality (a lie). My heart beat fast. I went in to greet our visitor.
It was the stranger.