“Oh, ask her to come up!” she exclaimed. “And Jackson——”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“If Mr. Hartsilver should come in while I am out, he had better be told that I shall not be in for lunch.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jackson, the maid, went downstairs with a look of mild amusement in her eyes. She had been in the Hartsilvers’ service two years, and was fond of expressing her opinion to the other servants on the subject of what she called her master and mistress’s “matrimonial mésalliance.”
“I give them another year,” she had observed to the cook only the night before, “and that will see the end of it. However a lady like her came to marry that—that old woman of a husband of hers fair beats me.”
“Not so much of the ‘old woman,’” the cook had answered sharply—she showed signs of age herself. “But I do agree with you, Mary, nevertheless. Ah, well, the old feller’s got the money-bags, and that goes a long way when it comes to marryin’, I always says. I never did hold with these love and cottage matches, nor I never shall. I’ve had some of it, I can tell you, and I have told you before now, but seein’ as my poor old man lies in Carlisle churchyard, nil nisi bonus. Isn’t that how they put it? And he had his good points for all he was poor as a rat, that I will admit.”
Yootha Hagerston was one of Cora’s oldest and dearest friends, the one friend, indeed, of whom she had for years made an intimate confidant. Yootha was not married, but that was not due to any lack of suitors, for the proposals she had had were numerous. She was a very pretty girl, about two years younger than Cora: tall, slim, extremely graceful, and with a face full of expression. She was one of those girls who attract through their personality rather than by the beauty of their features. The look in the large intelligent eyes betrayed her temperamental nature. She lived alone in an unpretentious flat near Knightsbridge, which she had taken two years before, after leaving her home near Penrith owing, as she put it, to the “impossible sort of life my people expected me to lead, boxed up in the country and with nothing on earth to do.” The truth was that her stepmother disliked her, and that her father was intemperate. Yootha was the youngest of three children; her two brothers were serving oversea.
When she entered Cora’s bedroom, Cora came forward and kissed her fondly.
“You dear thing,” she exclaimed. “I am so glad you have come. I have not seen you for a week. Where in the world have you been?”