“No, no, no!” cried Lucy, as she wondered what Mrs Alleyne would have said if she had heard her allusion to “one servant now.”
“Oh, but I shall,” he said; and the maid looked less grim as she saw the doctor begin to help. “Let’s see,” he said, “knives right, forks left. Won’t do to turn the table round if you place them wrong, as the Irishman did.”
Just then the maid—Eliza—left the room to fetch some addition to the table.
“I am glad you are going to stay, Mr Oldroyd,” said Lucy naïvely.
“Are you?” he said, watching her intently as the busy little hands produced cruets and glasses from the sideboard cupboard.
“Oh yes, for it is so dull here.”
“Do you find it so?”
“Oh, no, I don’t. I was thinking of Moray. It will be someone for him to talk to. Mamma fidgets about him so; but I felt as sure as could be that he only looked ill because he works so terribly hard.”
A step was heard outside, and the young doctor started from the table, where he was arranging a couple of spoons on either side of a salt-cellar, with so guilty a look that Lucy turned away her head to conceal a smile.
Oldroyd saw it though, and was annoyed at being so weak and boyish; but he felt that, after all, he was right, for it would have looked extremely undignified in Mrs Alleyne’s eyes if he had been caught playing so domestic a part in a strange house.