“Every quarter of an hour!” repeats Miss Carew, for once forgetful of and disobedient to her instructions as to unhesitating acquiescence in everything that might be suggested to her. “But you may be asleep!”
“And if I am!” returns Miss Prince, with such an expression of high-flown enthusiasm on her discoloured countenance as makes Lavinia’s pity almost succumb to an unpardonable inclination to laugh.
She escapes at last without having disgraced herself by any overt evidence of amusement, though her departure is delayed by the determination of Miss Prince to invest her messenger in her own cap and apron.
“He has grown used to having them about him,” says Féo, with pensive peremptoriness; while a recollection of ill-controlled cap-strings gambolling across patient eyes confirms the statement in the hearer’s mind, and she sets forth reluctantly equipped in an attire which, like David’s, she has not proved.
Admitted by Nurse Blandy with a lofty cordiality which speaks less for her own merit than for the lustre with which she shines by contrast with Féodorovna, Lavinia finds herself once more standing by that bedside whence her spirit has so rarely stirred since the day, which now seems so incomputably distant, when first her lagging feet carried her thither. Their hands lie in each other’s with the large sense of freedom that the absence of any onlooker gives; the consciousness that, as far as any one to note their clasp goes, they may remain in thrilled contact from now till night. As if in malicious acting upon the knowledge that such a course would be the most distasteful possible to her young employer, Nurse Blandy has hastened to leave them tête-à-tête. In their eyes, as they rush to meet, each reads the other’s joyous elation in the thought that not only is there no Féodorovna present to cramp and chill their greeting, but that all through the long wealth of the afternoon to be theirs no opening door need scare them with the swishing announcement of her paralyzing presence.
“So I have a new nurse!” he says, his look wandering with slow delight over the array that had made her feel like a mummer.
“Miss Prince thought that, as you were used to the dress, it would be better that I should wear it.”
“Yes; I am used to the dress.”
The implication that he is not used to the wearer is so clear to them both, as to draw a little gauzy veil of shyness between them.
“I feel rather like Jacob, having jockeyed Esau out of his occupation,” she says, talking somewhat at random; the more so for the consciousness that his eyes have done with her cap and apron, and now find employment in the string of pearls that, as both of them know, owes no ascription to Féodorovna. Involuntarily one of Lavinia’s hands goes up to her throat, with the impulse to hide the jewels, though a cold instinct tells her that he has already discovered their origin.