“My word, mother!” she had said, “it’s a queer business for a respectable girl that’s maid in a great place to be feeling as if she had to watch black people, same as if she was in the police, and not daring to say a word; for if I did say a word, Captain Osborn’s clever enough to have me sent away from here in a jiffy.  And the worst of it is,” twisting her hands together, “there mayn’t be anything going on really.  If they were as innocent as lambs they couldn’t act any different; and just the same, things might have happened by accident.”

“That’s the worst of it,” was Mrs. Cupp’s fretted rejoinder.  “Any old piece of carving might have dropped out of a balustrade, and any lady that wasn’t well might have nightmare and be disturbed in her sleep.”

“Yes,” admitted Jane, anxiously, “that is the worst of it.  Sometimes I feel so foolish I’m all upset with myself.”

The gossip in servants’ halls embraces many topics.  In country houses there is naturally much to be said of village incidents, of the scandals of cottages and the tragedies of farms.  This afternoon, at one end of the table the talk had been of a cottage scandal which had verged on tragedy.  A handsome, bouncing, flaunting village girl had got into that “trouble” which had been anticipated for her by both friends and enemies for some time.  Being the girl she was, much venomous village social stir had resulted.  It had been predicted that she would “go up to London,” or that she would drown herself, having an impudent high spirit which brought upon her much scornful and derisive flouting on her evil day.  The manor servants knew a good deal of her, because she had been for a while a servant at The Kennel Farm, and had had a great fancy for Ameerah, whom it had pleased her to make friends with.  When she fell suddenly ill, and for days lay at the point of death, there was a stealthy general opinion that Ameerah, with her love spells and potions, could have said much which might have been enlightening, if she had chosen.  The girl had been in appalling danger.  The village doctor, who had been hastily called in, had at one moment declared that life had left her body.  It was, in fact, only Ameerah who had insisted that she was not dead.  After a period of prostration, during which she seemed a corpse, she had slowly come back to earthly existence.  The graphic descriptions of the scenes by her bedside, of her apparent death, her cold and bloodless body, her lagging and ghastly revival to consciousness, aroused in the servants’ hall a fevered interest.  Ameerah was asked questions, and gave such answers as satisfied herself if not her interlocutors.  She was perfectly aware of the opinions of her fellow servitors.  She knew all about them while they knew nothing whatsoever about her.  Her limited English could be used as a means of baffling them.  She smiled, and fell into Hindustani when she was pressed.