The old lady tossed her head. “I do my best,” she continued, “but that girl would not have stayed in the house for one week if I had had my way. Miss Phil is altogether too soft-hearted. Thank goodness, she goes to-morrow, though.”
“You don’t refer to Miss Phil?” said Harley, intentionally misunderstanding.
“Gracious goodness, no!” exclaimed the housekeeper, and laughed with simple glee at the joke. “I mean Jones, the new parlourmaid. When I say new, they are all new, for none of them stay longer than three months.”
“Indeed,” smiled Harley, who perceived that the old lady was something of a martinet.
“Indeed, they don’t. Think they are ladies nowadays. Four hours off has that girl had to-day, although she was out on Wednesday. Then she has the impudence to allow someone to ring her up here at the house; and finally I discover her upsetting the table after Benson had laid it and after I had rearranged it.”
She glanced indignantly in the direction of the lobby. “Perhaps one day,” she concluded, pathetically, as she walked slowly from the room, “we shall find a parlourmaid who is a parlourmaid. Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening,” said Harley, quietly amused to be made the recipient of these domestic confidences.
He continued to smile for some time after the door had been closed. His former train of ideas was utterly destroyed, but for this he was not ungrateful to the housekeeper, since the outstanding disadvantage of that strange gift resembling prescience was that it sometimes blunted the purely analytical part of his mind when this should have been at its keenest. He was now prepared to listen to what Sir Charles had to say and to judge impartially of its evidential value.
Wandering from side to side of the library, he presently found himself standing still before the mantelpiece and studying a photograph in a silver frame which occupied the centre of the shelf. It was the photograph of an unusually pretty girl; that is to say, of a girl whose beauty was undeniable, but who belonged to a type widely removed from that of the ordinary good-looking Englishwoman.
The outline of her face was soft and charming, and there was a questioning look in her eyes which was alluring and challenging. Her naive expression was palpably a pose, and her slightly parted lips promised laughter. She possessed delightfully wavy hair and her neck and one shoulder, which were bare, had a Grecian purity. Harley discovered himself to be smiling at the naive lady of the photograph.