"Mrs. Jonah Potts is coming up the avenoo."
Miss Gastonguay immediately fell into a temper. "Confusion to that woman! Chelda isn't at home and she will ask for me. She knows I hate her. Prosperity, tell her I'm out,—no, I won't lie for her, and if she wants to see me, she'll force her way in, for her impudence is colossal. But do you, my dear, escape—" and she pushed Derrice toward the door. "Run, fly, go anywhere you like. You wouldn't like her,—a great florid creature, whom I always imagine sitting on her children and killing them. I assure you, she choked and smothered and dosed the sickly creatures to death, with her perfumes and her cushions, and the heat of her house. Faugh, I loathe her. Prosperity, if you don't go tell her to take a ship for Tarshish, I'll dismiss you to-morrow."
The old man, with signs of suppressed excitement, withdrew to the hall, and Derrice gazed from the inflamed visage of her hostess to the mountain of flesh waddling in, under a high-coloured bonnet and flaunting feathers.
Derrice slipped by Prosperity, who had his hand over his giggling mouth, and passed into one room after another on the ground floor of the house.
She might have imagined herself in the dwelling of a French country gentleman. The same elegant reserve in the matter of furnishing from a well-filled purse was everywhere apparent. There was enough for comfort, even for luxury, but no crowding, no superfluity of ornament. Everywhere were polished floors, handsome rugs, and carefully chosen paintings, all on foreign subjects and all brought from the mother country by the different members of the house. She looked into a dining-room, where, on a huge mahogany table, undisfigured by a covering, stood a bowl of exquisite roses from the hothouse of her hostess. Carved cabinets stood about this room, and with a lingering step she paused to examine some of their treasures of faience, these, too, brought from over the sea.
Near by was the music-room, with high-backed stools, green velvet benches against the walls, and a variety of musical instruments. Derrice was no musician, and drawing her fingers gently over the keyboard of the grand piano, she went past the rows of violins, guitars, and banjos, and a recess containing a small organ, until she reached the narrow, severely carved wooden entrance to a library.
Here she lingered for a long time, but her love for adventure being stronger than her love for literature, she left behind her the cool, quiet atmosphere of the room, with its faint sweet smell of leather from the rich bindings of the books, and again made her way to the wide hall that ran through the house.
"Do you think I might go up-stairs?" she asked, pausing on the lower step of the staircase.
"Yes, miss," said old Prosperity, and he stopped his slow walk, and uncrossed the hands behind his back in order to make a gesture that would urge her on. This was an unusually favoured guest, he saw, and one whom his mistress delighted to honour.
"Miss Gastonguay likes to have people go over the house,—that is, if she asks them," he added.