“That’s my little attentive daughter! Good-bye. Mr. Ludlow, if you will stay to dinner we shall be happy.”
Mrs. Smith came in as he left the room. She was rather a plain likeness of Miss Chalk, not much older. But her face had a straightforward, open look, and I liked her. She made much of me and said how kind she had thought it of Mrs. Todhetley to be at the trouble of making a fichu for her, a stranger. She hoped—she did hope, she added rather anxiously, that Sophie had not asked her to do it. And it struck me that Mrs. Smith had not quite the implicit confidence in Miss Sophie’s sayings and doings that she might have had.
It was five o’clock when I got away. At the door of the office in the side street stood a gentleman—the same I had seen pass me the other day. I looked at him, and he at me.
“Is it Roger Monk?”
A startled look came over his face. He evidently did not remember me. I said who I was.
“Dear me! How you have grown! Do walk in.” And he spoke to me in the tones an equal would speak, not as a servant.
As he was leading the way into a sort of parlour, we passed a clerk at a desk, and a man talking to him.
“Here’s Mr. Everty; he will tell you,” said the clerk, indicating Monk. “He is asking about those samples of pale brandy, sir: whether they are to go.”
“Yes, of course; you ought to have taken them before this, Wilson,” was Roger Monk’s answer. And so I saw that he was Mr. Everty.