She sank again upon her knees by the bedside, and greyed long for Divine help and deliverance.
Chapter Thirty Three.
Mrs Fitzroy’s Governess.
Mrs Charles Fitzroy was delighted with her new Italian governess.
She had contemplated engaging a Frenchwoman or a Swiss to teach little Bertha, but most fortunately, General Borselli, whom she had met during a season spent with her husband in Rome, came to her aid and recommended the daughter of the deceased Colonel Nodari. She came, and her slight, rather tall figure in neat black, her well-cut, handsome features, and her plainly dressed hair, almost black, had attracted her mistress from the first. She was refined, unobtrusive, merry-eyed, and just the kind of bright companion and governess she required for her child. She noticed that although her dresses were well made there were tokens, in more ways than one, that since her father’s death she and her mother had fallen upon evil days.
Fitzroy himself liked her. There was something interesting in her quaint broken English and in her foreign gestures that commended itself to him in preference to the angular blue-stocking Miss Gardener, who had recently left his wife’s service. So “Mademoiselle,” as they called her in preference to the rather ugly word “Signorina,” quickly became as one of the family, and within a week of her arrival she met that pompous millionaire of eggs and bacon, Mr Morgan-Mason.
The latter became as much attracted by her as were the others, but she exerted no effort to captivate or to gain admiration, merely acting her part modestly as became the humble governess in a wealthy family. Nevertheless she recollected the general’s instructions, and more than once, in the secrecy of her room, wrote to that address in Genoa reporting her progress.
Mrs Charles Fitzroy, a pretty and rather extravagant woman, still on the right side of forty, moved in a very good set, and entertained a good deal at her house in Brook Street. Her husband was a magnate in the city, and the fact that Morgan-Mason was her brother gave her the entrée to houses which would have otherwise been closed to her. Fitzroy, a rather short, grey-bearded man with a florid countenance, had risen from a clerk’s stool to be what he was, and differed in little particular from thousands of well-off city men who live in the West End and enter the anteroom of society.