"If you mean to come with me, you had best put on a plainer gown."
"I have none plainer than this. 'Tis no matter if I spoil it, for I am tired of the colour. Oh, here is Mrs. Stobart," she cried, as a servant ushered in Lucy, who entered timidly, looking for her husband.
"Your ladyship's servant," she murmured with a curtsey. "Is it time for us to go home, George?"
"Time for me to take you to the coach, Lucy. I shall spend the day among my people."
"And I am to go home alone," his wife said ruefully.
"I shall be with you by tea-time, and you will have your boy and a world of household cares to engage you till then."
She brightened at this, and smiled at him.
"I'll warrant Hannah will not have dusted the parlour," she said. "Oh, madam, we have such pretty mahogany furniture, and I do love to keep it bright. There's nothing like elbow-grease for a mahogany table."
"I know that by experience, child. I have used it myself," Antonia answered gaily.
She was pleased and excited at the idea of a plunge into the mysteries of outcast London. She had been poor herself, but had known only the shabby genteel poverty which keeps shoes to its feet and a weathertight roof over its head. With want and rags and filth she had never come in contact save in her brief glimpse of the Irish and English towns at Limerick; and looking back upon that experience of a brain overwrought with grief, it seemed to her like a fever-dream. To-day she would go among the abodes of misery with a mind quick to see and understand. Surely, surely she could do her part in the duty that the rich owe the poor without selling all that she had, without abrogating one iota of the sumptuous surroundings so dear to her romantic temper, to her innate love of the beautiful.