“Susan Ann, where’s your mother?”
The girl with the baby on her knee struggled to her feet and answered:
“She’s up at the house beyond, Miss.”
“I just thought she must be,” said Priscilla, “when I saw William Thomas and the other boy playing there, and you nursing the baby. If your mother wasn’t up at the house you’d all be in your beds.”
She wheeled the bath-chair on until she turned the corner of the avenue and was lost to the sight of the children who peered after her. Then she paused.
“Cousin Frank,” she said, “it’s just as well for you to be prepared for some kind of fuss when we get home.”
“We’re awfully late, I know.”
“It’s not that. It’s something far worse. The fuss that’s going on up there at the present moment is a thunderstorm compared to what there would be over our being late.”
“How do you know there’s a fuss?”
“Before she was married,” said Priscilla, “Mrs. Geraghty—that’s the woman at the gate lodge, the mother of those four children—was our upper housemaid. Aunt Juliet simply loved her. She rubs her into all the other servants day and night. She says she was the only sufficient housemaid. I’m not sure that that’s quite the right word. It may be efficient. Any how she says she’s the only something-or-other-ficient housemaid she ever had; which of course is a grand thing for Mrs. Geraghty, though not really as nice as it seems, because whenever anything perfectly appalling happens Aunt Juliet sends for her. Then she and Aunt Juliet rag the other servants until things get smoothed out again. The minute I saw those children sporting about when by rights they ought to be in bed I knew that Mrs. Geraghty had been sent for. Now you understand the sort of thing you have to expect when we get home. I thought I’d just warn you, so that you wouldn’t be taken by surprise.”