"There will be many fine folks there to-night, I suppose?" she asked.
The butler rubbed his nose perplexedly. "Fine folks at Winsleigh House? Well, as far as clothes go, I dare say there will. But there'll be no one like her ladyship—no one!" And he shook his grey head emphatically.
"Of course not!" said Britta, with a sort of triumphant defiance. "We know that very well, Morris! There's no one like her ladyship anywhere in the wide world! But I tell you what—I think a great many people will be jealous of her."
Morris smiled. "You may take your oath of that, Miss Britta," he said with placid conviction. "Jealous! Jealous isn't the word for it! Why," and he surveyed Britta's youthful countenance with fatherly interest, "you're only a child as it were, and you don't know the world much. Now, I've been five and twenty years in this family, and I knew Sir Philip's mother, the Lady Eulalie—he named his yacht after her. Ah! she was a sweet creature—she came from Austria, and she was as dark as her present ladyship is fair. Wherever she went, I tell you, the women were ready to cry for spite and envy of her good looks—and they would say anything against her they could invent. That's the way they go on sometimes in society, you know."
"As bad as in Bosekop," murmured Britta, more to herself than to him, "only London is a larger place." Then raising her voice again, she said, "Perhaps there will be some people wicked enough to hate her ladyship, Morris?"
"I shouldn't wonder," said Morris philosophically. "I shouldn't wonder at all! There's a deal of hate about one way or another,—and if a lady is as beautiful as an angel, and cuts out everybody wherever she goes, why you can't expect the other ladies to be very fond of her. 'Tisn't in human nature—at least not in feminine human nature. Men don't care much about their looks, one way or the other, unless they're young chaps—then one has a little patience with them and they come all right."
But Britta had become meditative again. She went slowly up into her mistress's room and began arranging the few trifles that had been left in disorder.
"Just fancy!"—she said to herself—"some one may hate the Fröken even in London just as they hated her in Bosekop, because she is so unlike everybody else. I shall keep my eyes open,—and I shall soon find out any wickedness against her! My beautiful, dear darling! I believe the world is a cruel place after all,—but she shan't be made unhappy in it, if I can help it!"
And with this emphatic declaration, she kissed a little shoe of Thelma's that she was just putting by—and, smoothing her curls, went down to her supper.