Miss Green Ulster confided that her name was Cass, that she came from Laxton, that her father, three years dead, had been a solicitor, that her mother had been dead six months, that she was left unprovided for, and that by the recommendation of Canon Carnaby, the vicar of the parish, who had been very good to her mother and herself, she was going as governess to the two young children of Lieutenant Colonel Everard Trenchard-Simpson, D. S. O., The Laurels, Clavering St. Mary’s.
Elfreda was secretly amused by a simplicity which told so much and concealed so little. All the same she was oddly attracted by the way this little suburban laid all her cards on the table. Her hopes, her fears, her pathetic desire for self improvement, the general bleakness of her outlook, her cruel sense of loneliness now that her mother as well as her father was dead, her poverty, her lack of a really first-class education, the exposure of all these things verged upon the indecent, but somehow they called insistently for pity.
Poor Miss Cass! And yet ... Elfreda shivered at her thoughts ... lucky Miss Cass!
“How thrilling to act ... in public ... on a real stage ... to a real audience!” The gray eyes looked quite charming in their awe and their sincerity.
“Do you really think so?” The slight drawl with its tag of fatigue was equally sincere.
“Oh, I should just love it—that is, I should just love it if I were you.” The candor was almost indecent, but a nearly whole tumbler of a great wine was working spells. What Miss Cass really meant was that she would love to be the daughter of a marquis.
Elfreda deplored her taste and sighed for her innocence. “Think how bored you’d be to learn a long and stupid part—so that you were simply word perfect in it.”
“I should just love it.” Miss Cass grew enthusiastic at the thought. “If I could also be the daughter of a marquis” was the major part of that thought, which, however, she did not put into words. But those fatal eyes of hers, in which her soul dwelt, put it into words for her.
Elfreda smiled pityingly. How little she knew!
“By the way, you come from Laxton?”