“Certainly!” replied Billy, all alacrity, “certainly.”
“With a little tepid water,” continued Miss Willing, looking imploringly at Billy as he rose to fulfil her behests.
“Such airs!” growled Pheasant-feathers to her next neighbour with an indignant toss of her colour-varying head.
Billy presently appeared, bearing one of the old deep blue-patterned finger-glasses, with a fine damask napkin, marked with a ducal coronet—one of the usual perquisites of servitude.
Miss then holding each pretty hand downwards, stripped her fingers of their rings, just as a gardener strips a stalk of currants of its fruit, dropping, however, a large diamond ring (belonging to her ladyship, which she was just airing) skilfully under the table, and for which fat Billy had to dive like a dog after an otter.
“Oh, dear!” she was quite ashamed at her awkwardness and the trouble she had given, she assured Billy, as he rose red and panting from the pursuit.
“Done on purpose to show her finery,” muttered Pheasant-feather bonnet, with a sneer.
Miss having just passed the wet end of the napkin across her cherry lips and pearly teeth, and dipped her fingers becomingly in the warm water, was restoring her manifold rings, when the shrill twang, twang, twang of the horn, with the prancing of some of the newly-harnessed cripples on the pavement as they tried to find their legs, sounded up the arch-way into the little room, and warned our travellers that they should be reinvesting themselves in their wraps. So declining any more Teneriffe, Miss Willing set the example by drawing on her pretty kid gloves, and rising to give the time to the rest. Up they all got.