The consequence of this conversation was that Mademoiselle bound Mrs Dawson over to the most absolute secrecy, and thoroughly won over that good woman’s confidence, who declared that she already felt she could not live without Mademoiselle, who went off to her own room with the bangle in her pocket.
Before she lay down to sleep that night she looked at it again. She kissed it; she gloated over it. Finally, she locked it up, not in the drawer which might be easily opened by another key, but in that small leather bag where she kept her treasured hoardings and which she hardly ever allowed out of her sight.
Mademoiselle slept soundly that night, and went downstairs the next morning in radiant spirits. Now the two little girl Amberleys had one frantic desire, and that was, to show Fanchon their brooches. If Fanchon had a shilling bangle, which she was so intensely proud of, why should not they be proud, more than proud of their half-crown brooches? Miss Carlton often left her pupils during the morning hours to their own devices. She had letters to write, and shopping to do, and she often liked to stroll on the promenade alone, hoping that Harry, the perverse, might meet her there.
This very morning the girls found themselves in their bedroom alone. Mademoiselle had, of course, to a certain extent, made them promise that they would not wear the brooches in public; but that was a very different matter from showing them to their own dear Fanchon, their sister.
“Although she is a stuck-up thing,” said Nina, “she is our own flesh and flood, and we’ll put her to shame by showing the darlings to her, although she has not trusted us.”
Accordingly, as Nina sat on the edge of her bed that morning, she turned to Fanchon and said:
“When will that Penelope girl arrive?”
“I think she’s coming to lunch,” answered Fanchon. “I suppose she’s a second Brenda,” exclaimed Josie. “Oh, I don’t think she’s at all like her,” answered Fanchon. “Besides, she is much, much younger.”
“Brenda is very old indeed,” said Nina. “She’s twenty-one; I can hardly imagine anybody being quite as old as that—it must be such an awful weight of years on one’s head.”
“They say it isn’t,” replied Fanchon, who was becoming learned in all sorts of matters she had better have known nothing about. “Brenda says that you don’t even begin to feel grown-up until you are past twenty.”