The morning came, and with it, according to his promise, Jerome came to breakfast, bringing Avice with him. ‘Try to persuade her to be pleased to stay with me,’ Sara had said to him, to which he had naturally replied by an emphatic wonder as to what else than pleasure his sister possibly could feel at the prospect.
Sara was restless that morning. She wandered from her studio to her sitting-room, and back to her studio again. She had told Ellen that the gentleman who had called last night would come to breakfast with his sister, and Mrs. Nelson had busied herself in preparing as recherché a repast as possible, placing fresh flowers on the table, and making everything look bright and festive.
‘The gentleman was English, wasn’t he, Miss Sara?’ she asked.
‘Yes, he was—is, I mean.’
‘Then we’ll show him that we know how to serve an English breakfast, nice, and bright, and choice; rather different from their pots of butter, and baskets of cobs, and a table-cloth, and a coffee-machine—that’s about all they give you for breakfast in these parts,’ said Mrs. Nelson, resentfully, for she had never got over the disgust she had experienced in partaking for the first time, and seeing her young lady partake, of a German breakfast, in the native boarding-house style.
Accordingly, the breakfast-table, in the shady corner of the room, was a refreshing spectacle; but Mrs. Nelson’s eyes, despite her seeming engrossment in her work, kept wandering towards her mistress, whose restlessness she had not failed to observe.
‘Only the gentleman and his sister, Miss Ford?’ she asked tentatively.
‘Yes. And—Ellen!’
‘Ma’am?’
‘I want you to like Miss Wellfield very much, for she is coming to stay with me, for several months, at least.’