"Step inside," came the short order, whilst Henry, the first footman, inwardly remarked that he wished her ladyship wouldn't go putting in advertisements, and not mentioning them to the establishment. "Take a seat there, and I'll ascertain whether her ladyship is disengaged."
Had Christina been in her normal health, the man's grandiloquent manner and language would have amused her. With her nerves at high tension, her limbs trembling, and her whole frame exhausted and weary, she felt only a great inclination either to flee out of the front door, or to sit down and cry. The hall, softly-carpeted and warm, fragrant with the flowers massed in great pots at the foot of the staircase, and quiet with the stillness of a well-ordered house, oppressed her. The solemn voice of a grandfather clock in the corner, had only the effect of making the prevailing silence more noticeable, and Christina experienced a wild longing to scream, or to burst into uncontrollable laughter, just to break the stillness which weighed upon her like a nightmare.
"Will you come this way, please?"
She started violently as the footman's voice sounded close to her. His footstep on the thick pile of the stair carpet had been quite inaudible, and she was surprised to see him once more beside her. At his bidding she rose mechanically, and followed him up the wide staircase, whose soft carpet was a bewildering novelty to the girl accustomed to the simplest surroundings, across a landing, fragrant, like the hall, with growing roses and exotic plants, into a small boudoir, in which she found herself alone. In all her twenty years of life she had never before been in a room like this room, and, standing in the centre of it, just where her guide had left her, she looked round her timidly, and drew a long breath of admiration and amazement.
The murkiness of the November day that darkened the world outside, did not appear to enter into this lovely apartment, which gave Christina a sense of summer and sunshine.
"It is just like a pink rose," she said to herself, her eyes wandering from the walls, delicately tinted a soft rose colour, to the sofa and chairs upholstered in a deeper shade of the same colour, and the carpet, whose darker tint of rose harmonised with the paler hues. Every table seemed to the girl to overflow with books and magazines; bowls of flowers, vases of flowers, pots of flowers, stood on every available shelf, and in every possible corner. The windows were draped with rose-coloured silk curtains, that made even the grey sky beyond them look less grey, and the pictures on the walls drew a gasp of delight from Christina's lips. They were mainly landscapes, and in almost every case they represented wide spaces, open tracts of country, that gave one a sense of life and freshness. Here was an expanse of sea, blue and smiling as the sky that stooped to meet it; there, long green rollers swept up a sandy beach, whilst clouds lit up by a rift of sunshine, lay on the horizon. On this side was a moorland, purple with heather, bathed in the glory of the setting sun; on that side, a plain, far-reaching as the sea itself, soft and green and misty, bounded by mountains, whose snow-crowned summits stood out in serried stateliness against the faint blue sky. In a looking-glass hanging on the wall, Christina caught sight of her own reflection, and a shamed consciousness of her white face and shabby clothes, gave her a sense of the incongruousness between her own appearance, and the loveliness around her. But this uneasy sense of discrepancy had barely entered her mind, when the door opened, and there entered a tiny personage, whose daintiness made Christina all at once feel huge, awkward, and ungainly.
"It was sweet of you to come," the little lady exclaimed, holding out to the girl a white hand flashing with diamonds, "you are the kind lady who brought my Baba home? Henry was very incoherent; he always is, in a grand, long-winded way of his own. But I gathered from his meandering remarks, that you had come in answer to my advertisement."
"Yes," Christina answered; "I saw it—the advertisement—in the Morning Post to-day. I thought it was so kind of you to advertise, that I came. But, of course, when I brought the darling baby home, I only did what everybody else would have done," she added, rather breathlessly.
"A lady—and very proud," the thought ran through her listener's brain; but aloud the little lady only said:
"I can't put into words how grateful I am to you, all the same. You see, my little girlie is my ewe lamb—my only child—and she is very precious. If anything had happened to her, I—oh! but we mustn't talk about dreadful things that might happen, when I hope they never will. Baba was a naughty monkey to run out alone. But she is rather a sweet monkey, isn't she?"