“It’s a fact,” said cook, “and it’s to come off at once.”
“What, her? Disgraceful!”
Cook smiled again, with the quiet confidence of knowledge, and ignoring the butler’s remark, she fixed the maids in turn with her eye.
“Mrs Rolph has taken a furnished house in London for three months, and they’re going to it next week, and as Perkins’ man says, it do seem hard, after getting on for two years without delivering regular joints at the house for them to be off again.”
“Well,” said Mason, Glynne’s maid, contemptuously, “I wish the lady joy of him. A low, common, racing and betting man. I wouldn’t marry him if he was made of gold.”
“Right, Mrs Mason,” said Morris. “I don’t know what Nature was thinking about to make him an officer. No disrespect meant to those in the stables, but to my mind, if Captain Rolph—and I saw a deal of him when he was here—had found his—his—”
“Focus,” suggested cook, and there was a roar in which the butler joined, by way of smoothing matters over with his fellow-servant.
“I meant to say level, cook. He would have been a helper, or the driver of a cab. He was never fit for our young lady.”
The servants’ hall tattle proved to be quite correct, for within a week The Warren was vacant again, Rolph being back at barracks, and Mrs Rolph and her niece at a little house in one of the streets near Lowndes Square, busily occupied in preparing the lady’s trousseau, for the marriage was to take place within a month.
It was not long after that the news reached The Firs, and Lucy became very thoughtful, and ended by feeling glad. She hardly knew why, but she was pleased at the idea of Captain Rolph being married and out of the way.