“Pixie, Kate tells me you were in Lottie’s room before you came down. Was she nearly ready?”
“She was, Miss Phipps, quite ready! Only waiting for me. She’s on a white dress, and—”
“Never mind that. I want you to run upstairs, please, and tell her that the cab is here. She must put on her wraps and come down at once.”
“I will, Miss Phipps.” There was a whisk of short black skirts and off she went, running lightly upstairs, and raising her voice in rich, musical cry, “Lottie! Lottie!”
“The real Irish voice! She ought to be able to sing charmingly when she is older,” said Miss Phipps to Mademoiselle, and Mademoiselle nodded her head in assent.
“I ’ope so! It is a great charm for a young girl to sing well, and she is not pretty. La pauvre petite!”
“No; yet the father is fine-looking, and my friends tell me that the two sisters are quite beauties, and all the family wonderfully handsome with this one exception. But Pixie is better than pretty, she is charming. Would you be kind enough to go to the dining-room to see if everything is ready, Mademoiselle? It is time we began tea.”
Mademoiselle departed, and came back to give the required signal, when the girls filed slowly across the hall, casting curious glances at Lottie as she came downstairs. She was wrapped up in a long white cloak, and had a fleecy shawl thrown over her head, almost covering her face from view. She looked very dainty, and when the door opened and they beheld her step into the cab, they felt a rising of envy which could not be entirely removed, even by the sight of the luxurious tea spread out on the dining-room table.
“Lottie is a lucky creature!” sighed Clara discontentedly. “She is always going out. I wish my people lived near, instead of at the other end of England. I am glad I am North Country, though; I don’t like Southerners! I agree with Tennyson—
“‘True, and firm, and tender is the North;
False, and fair, and smiling is the South.’”