“Mrs. Eldon wants you up there in her dressin’ room right away, Miss Ethel,” said the girl who opened the door and admitted her in answer to her ring.
“Very well,” Ethel replied, and tripped lightly up the stairs, though her heart beat at the prospect before her.
She found her aunt lying idly on the sofa in her dressing gown and slippers, her hair in curl papers, and a paper-covered novel in her hand. “Well, miss,” she exclaimed, “a pretty time you have been gone, leaving me lying here with nobody to read to me; for your cousins are all too busy of course, and not one of them has a voice so well suited to allay the nervousness that drives me so nearly distracted.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Augusta,” replied the young girl in a patient tone. “I did not mean to stay so long, but I had some errands——”
“Oh, did you match that lace?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ethel answered, taking a little roll from her pocket. “Here it is.”
“Then make haste and carry it to the sewing room, and tell Miss Finch to baste it in the neck and sleeves of that new black silk of mine. Then leave your hat and sack in your own room and come here and read to me.”
Ethel, though longing to go in search of Nannette, from whom she must part, in a large measure, so soon, also to consider and gather together what she would need to take with her to Mrs. Baker’s, obeyed the order without any show of reluctance, and spent the next hour in reading to her aunt.
By that time Mrs. Eldon had fallen asleep, perceiving which the young girl stole silently from the room and went to her own.
But she had scarcely reached it and shut herself in when the door was opened again by someone on the outside and Arabella put in her head, asking, “Where’s that sewing silk I told you to get me? and the buttons? did you match them?”