Anne Hereford: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

"If you please, may I take this with me?" for I had once more caught up the tantalizing supper.

"Of course you can, little stupid!"

I went to the door, the beef and ham doubled up in one hand, the buttered roll in the other, and there eat and listened. The scene would have made a good picture. The distant bed on which the eatables were flung, and on which the tapers in their little bronze stands rested, and the girls in their night-gowns gathered round, half lounging on it, talking eagerly, eating ravenously, enjoying themselves thoroughly; I shivering at the door, delighted with the feast, but half-terrified lest interruption should come from below. That unlucky door had no fastening to it, so that any one could come, as the girls expressed it, bolt in. Some time previously there had been a disturbance, because the girls one night locked out Miss Dale, upon which Miss Fenton had carried away the key.

"Our beef and ham's gone, Anne Hereford. Is your?"

It was Georgina Digges who spoke, and she half-turned round to do so, for she was leaning forward on the bed with her back to me. I was about to answer, when there came a shrill scream from one of the others, a scream of terror. It was followed by another and another, until they were all screaming together, and I darted in alarm to the bed. Georgina Digges, in turning round, had let her night-gown sleeve touch one of the wax tapers, and set it on fire.

Oh, then was confusion! the shrieks rising and the flames with them. With a presence of mind perfectly astonishing in one so young, Nancy Tyler tore up the bedside carpet and flung it round her.

"Throw her down, throw her down! it is the only chance!" Nancy screamed to the rest, and there she was on the ground by the time those downstairs had rushed up. Some smothered more carpet on her, some threw a blanket, and the cook further poured out all the water from the washhand jugs.

"Who is it?" demanded Miss Fenton, speaking and looking more dead than alive.

None of us answered; we were too much terrified; but Miss Dale, who had been taking hurried note of our faces, said it must be Georgina Diggs: her face was the only one missing.

I wonder what Miss Fenton thought when she saw the items of the feast as they lay on the bed! The scanty remains of the beef and ham, the buttered rolls half eaten, others ready to butter, the pork pies, the German sausages, the jam tarts, and the bottle of wine. Did a thought cross her that if the girls had been allowed better dinners, they might have been less eager for stolen suppers? She had probably been disturbed at her good supper, for a table napkin was tucked before her, underneath the string of her silk apron.