“You see, Mrs Canninge—and sugar, please—three lumps. Yes, I always take cream, it do improve the tea so—you see my brother takes so much interest in the schools, and he’d set his mind upon the boys and girls enjoying themselves, that it would have been a sin and a shame not to have done one’s best to help him; but, oh my! It has been a job.”
“I’m sure you must have worked like a slave, Miss Burge,” said Mrs Canninge, handing the tea, “and we ought all to be very grateful to you and your brother.”
“Oh, it isn’t me, my dear,” said Miss Burge (fortunately neither Miss Lambent nor Beatrice was at hand to hear Mrs Canninge addressed as “my dear”)—“it is all my brother. He hasn’t a bit of pride in him. He says, you know, Mrs Canninge, he first learned to read and write at Plumton School, and it’s been so useful to him that—”
“Excuse me. Miss Burge, I have not my best glasses with me, is not this Miss—Miss—?”
“Thorne, yes, Mrs Canninge, and it’s very kind of your son to bring the poor dear in to have some tea.”
Mrs Canninge looked rather curiously at Hazel Thorne, as her son brought her into the drawing-room. If she had been plain and ordinary looking, Mrs Canninge would have thought nothing of the incident; but then Hazel Thorne was neither plain nor ordinary, and, what was more, she did not seem in the slightest degree oppressed by the novelty of the situation, but chatted quietly to her companion, who was the more conscious of the two.
“Oh, here is my mother,” he said. “Mother dear, I have brought you an exhausted slave; pray feed and rest her, or she will be throwing off the Plumton chains, and escaping to some place where they will treat her better. Miss Thorne, this is my mother, Mrs Canninge.”
“I am very glad to know you, Miss Thorne,” said Mrs Canninge quietly; and Hazel looked her full in the eyes before lowering her own, and bending slightly, for there was a something in Mrs Canninge’s way that was different to her son’s. George Canninge had spoken to her as if she were his equal, while his mother had smiled, spoken kindly, and hastened to pour out some tea; but Hazel felt and knew that it was not in the same way as she would have spoken and acted towards one of her own set.
The shade of difference was very slight, but it was marked, and George Canninge noted it as well, though it was lost upon little Miss Burge, who turned to Hazel, and began to prattle away directly.
“Ah, that’s right, Mr Canninge, I am glad you have brought Miss Thorne in. She has been regularly fagged to death. I never did see any one work so.”