I did not speak. After a while I remember finding myself, and granny of course, safe in a four-wheeler, which seemed narrow and stuffy compared to the Middlemoor flys, and jolted along with a terrible rattle and noise, so that I could scarcely distinguish the words grandmamma said when once or twice she spoke to me. I daresay a good deal of the noise was outside the cab, and some of it perhaps inside my own head, for it did not altogether stop even when we did—that is to say when we drew up at 29 Chichester Square.
The house was very large—the hall looked to me almost as large as the hall at Moor Court. It was not really so, but I could scarcely judge of anything correctly that night. I was so very tired.
A nice-looking oldish man came forward and bowed respectfully to grandmamma.—P. 126.
A nice-looking oldish man came forward and bowed respectfully to grandmamma. He was the butler. He handed us over, so to say, to a nice-looking oldish woman, who was the head housemaid, and she took us at once upstairs to our rooms, the butler asking grandmamma to leave the luggage and the cab-paying to him—he would see that it was all right. She thanked him nicely, but rather 'grandly'—not at all as if she was not accustomed to lots of servants and attention, which I was pleased at. It was a good thing for me that I had been so much with the Nestors; it prevented my seeming awkward or shy with so many servants about, which otherwise I might have been. Grandmamma of course had been used to being rich, but I never had.
There came a disappointment the very first thing. Hales, the housemaid, threw open the door of a large, rather gloomy-looking bedroom, where a fire was burning and candles already lighted.
'Your room, ma'am,' she said. 'Missie's——' she hesitated. 'Miss Wingfield's,' said granny. 'Miss Wingfield's,' Hales repeated, 'is on the next floor but one.'
Grandmamma looked uneasy.
'Is it far from this room?' she said.