Audrey nodded.  Her eyes were dreamy; the red of the buds in her hair had somehow stolen to her cheeks; she could scarce keep her lips from smiling.  “He bade me tell you to come to supper with him on Monday,” she said.  “And the Falcon that we saw come in last week brought furnishing for the great house.  Oh, Mistress Deborah, the most beautiful things!  The rooms are all to be made fine; and the negro women do not the work aright, and he wants some one to oversee them.  He says that he has learned that in England Mistress Deborah was own woman to my Lady Squander, and so should know about hangings and china and the placing of furniture.  And he asks that she come to Fair View morning after morning until the house is in order.  He wishes me to come, too.  Mistress Deborah will much oblige him, he says, and he will not forget her kindness.”

Somewhat out of breath, but very happy, she looked with eager eyes from one guardian to the other.  Darden emptied and refilled his pipe, scattering the ashes upon the book of jests.  “Very good,” he said briefly.

Into the thin visage of the ex-waiting-woman, who had been happier at my Lady Squander’s than in a Virginia parsonage, there crept a tightened smile.  In her way, when she was not in a passion, she was fond of Audrey; but, in temper or out of temper, she was fonder of the fine things which for a few days she might handle at Fair View house.  And the gratitude of the master thereof might appear in coins, or in an order on his store for silk and lace.  When, in her younger days, at Bath or in town, she had served fine mistresses, she had been given many a guinea for carrying a note or contriving an interview, and in changing her estate she had not changed her code of morals.  “We must oblige Mr. Haward, of course,” she said complacently.  “I warrant you that I can give things an air!  There’s not a parlor in this parish that does not set my teeth on edge!  Now at my Lady Squander’s”—­She embarked upon reminiscences of past splendor, checked only by her husband’s impatient demand for dinner.

Audrey, preparing to follow her into the kitchen, was stopped, as she would have passed the table, by the minister’s heavy hand.  “The roses at Fair View bloom early,” he said, turning her about that he might better see the red cluster in her hair.  “Look you, Audrey!  I wish you no great harm, child.  You mind me at times of one that I knew many years ago, before ever I was chaplain to my Lord Squander or husband to my Lady Squander’s waiting-woman.  A hunter may use a decoy, and he may also, on the whole, prefer to keep that decoy as good as when ’twas made.  Buy not thy roses too dearly, Audrey.”

To Audrey he spoke in riddles.  She took from her hair the loosened buds, and looked at them lying in her hand.  “I did not buy them,” she said.  “They grew in the sun on the south side of the great house, and Mr. Haward gave them to me.”

CHAPTER XII