“Mrs. Catherine is in the library, Miss Anne,” repeated a dark, thin, elfin-like girl, who sat on the sill of a deep window, reading, and hiding her book beneath the stocking which she ought to have been knitting, as she threw furtive glances to the door of the housekeeper’s especial sanctum: “but there’s gentlemen with her. It’s a business day.”
“I suppose you may admit me, Jacky,” said Anne. “Mrs. Catherine expects me.”
“Mr. Walter Foreman’s in, Miss Anne,” said Jacky.
“And what then?” said Anne, smiling.
“And Mr. Ferguson, the factor from Strathoran,” said the girl, gravely, taking up, with a look of abstraction, some dropt loops in her neglected stocking.
“Then I will go to the drawing-room,” said Anne. “Tell me, Jacky, when Mrs. Catherine is disengaged.”
“And Miss Anne,” said Jacky, starting, as Anne was about to pass on, “the young lady’s coming.”
“So I have heard,” said Anne.
“And she’s to get the mid-chamber,” said Jacky, “and the chairs have come out of the big room in the west tower. You never saw them, Miss Anne. Will you come?” And Jacky jerked her thin, angular frame off her seat, and threw down book and stocking.
“What have you been reading, Jacky?” said Anne.