Her rising anger swept into her heart like a reviving fire. She thought of Zeb, mouthing his scorn of the "dirty filthy heathen," she thought of Mademoiselle D'Ormy scolding a housemaid who left so much as a speck of dust on the hall balustrades, she did not see the grinning woman gesturing to her husband, touching her forehead to indicate Felicia's lack of wits.
"That ain't my business," the woman shrugged when she saw Felicia looking at her. "We pays out rent by a receiver since the Mister Burrel goes avay—I gotta get mine renta in adwance. I gotta nice room if you vant to stay."
"But it's my house, of course I'll stay."
"It's a nice room, three dollars a veek—you vant to see it?"
The color blazed in Felicia's cheeks.
"I should like you to take me to it at once," she announced with dignity. "You'll carry my bag, please."
The tailor's wife grumbingly obeyed her, preceding her new lodger with ill concealed temper, her lumpy person almost blocking the ample stairway.
Up they passed from the basement to the once stately hallway. Not even the encrusted dirt could hide the beauty of the old tessellated marble floors and arched doorways but where the oval topped doors had once swung hospitably wide their gloomy panels now hid the drawing-rooms, and where the long mirror had once made the hallway bright with reflected light a dingy ill-painted wall made the passage so gloomy that one could scarcely see above the first landing. Silently Felicia's weary feet carried her along behind her untidy conductor. Unconsciously she tiptoed as she passed the closed door of her mother's room, tiptoed as gently as though that frail sufferer were still lying listlessly on the "sleighback" bed. Quietly around the bend of the upper hall she followed, past the upstairs sitting room and up the second flight toward the sleeping chambers, her heart beating from the unwonted climb, her breath coming in quick gasps and her damp hair clinging to her aching forehead.
"Maybe," she exulted secretly, "it will be the nursery that I'll have —maybe I left something—" she smiled as she caught herself thinking it on the stairway—"perhaps there will be a little fire in the Peggoty grate and I can shut the door and sit down and think clearly."
But it wasn't the nursery. As they passed its closed door she could hear the wrangle of many voices, a baby's fretful cry and the hurrying whir of other sewing machines. The frowsy woman opened the door at the head of the stairs. The-three-dollar-a-week-room was the hall bedroom. The small room where Mademoiselle D'Ormy's bed had been wont to stand in the old days—with the door left ajar so that Felicia would not be frightened when she awoke in the night.