Luckily, however, as she probably would have caught cold from sitting still in a fireless room where the window was still slightly open at the top, and the door, of course, ajar—luckily, she was not long left in peace. A clatter and dash down the staircase, and Christabel’s voice—
“Where are you, Lell? Answer, can’t you?” as she dived in and out of the dining-room, without finding her sister. “Oh, there you are! You can’t be hidden for long in this cupboard of a house.”
Her good-humour seemed restored, and as Leila, unwillingly enough, glanced up in response to this summons, she saw that Christabel, if not very tidy as yet, still looked better than at the breakfast-table.
“What are you doing? Oh, reading of course. I say, it’s freezing in here. Don’t you see the window’s half open and there’s no fire. Why don’t you stay in the dining-room? There’s no one there,” Chrissie went on.
“Mother will be coming there directly, and I don’t want her to see me just now,” said Leila. “Chrissie,” she went on, feeling too much in need of sympathy to keep up her rôle of solitary martyrdom. “Chrissie, what do you think Mummy’s just been telling me? Shut the window, can’t you, if you don’t like it open. I’m sure I don’t care whether it’s open or shut—I’m far too miserable;” and Chrissie, her curiosity aroused, for once obeyed without a murmur, and then turned eagerly to Leila.
“What?” she asked, “are we to be sent to school?”
Leila shrugged her shoulders.
“I only wish it was that,” she said. “No—of course they’d say a good school would cost too much, and they couldn’t send us to a common one. No, it’s nothing about lessons. I daresay we shan’t be taught any more—it doesn’t seem as if we’d need to be! No—it’s this—you and I are to be housemaids!”
“What do you mean?” exclaimed Christabel, “you are talking nonsense.”
Leila explained, but to her chagrin she did not meet with the sympathy she expected. On the contrary, Christabel’s eyes sparkled.