“Go and fetch my cloak,” she says to him after a while.  “I am cold.”

And up he gets and goes out.

She never moved her head, and spoke as though she was merely giving me some order, and I stands behind her chair, respectful like, and answers according to the same tip,

“Ever hear from ’Kipper’?” she says to me.

“I have had one or two letters from him, your ladyship,” I answers.

“Oh, stow that,” she says.  “I am sick of ‘your ladyship.’  Talk English; I don’t hear much of it.  How’s he getting on?”

“Seems to be doing himself well,” I says.  “He’s started an hotel, and is regular raking it in, he tells me.”

“Wish I was behind the bar with him!” says she.

“Why, don’t it work then?” I asks.

“It’s just like a funeral with the corpse left out,” says she.  “Serves me jolly well right for being a fool!”

The Marquis, he comes back with her cloak at that moment, and I says: 
“Certainement, madame,” and gets clear.

I often used to see her there, and when a chance occurred she would talk to me.  It seemed to be a relief to her to use her own tongue, but it made me nervous at times for fear someone would hear her.

Then one day I got a letter from “Kipper” to say he was over for a holiday and was stopping at Morley’s, and asking me to look him up.

He had not changed much except to get a bit fatter and more prosperous-looking.  Of course, we talked about her ladyship, and I told him what she said.

“Rum things, women,” he says; “never know their own minds.”

“Oh, they know them all right when they get there,” I says.  “How could she tell what being a Marchioness was like till she’d tried it?”

“Pity,” he says, musing like.  “I reckoned it the very thing she’d tumble to.  I only come over to get a sight of ’er, and to satisfy myself as she was getting along all right.  Seems I’d better a’ stopped away.”

“You ain’t ever thought of marrying yourself?” I asks.

“Yes, I have,” he says.  “It’s slow for a man over thirty with no wife and kids to bustle him, you take it from me, and I ain’t the talent for the Don Juan fake.”

“You’re like me,” I says, “a day’s work, and then a pipe by your own fireside with your slippers on.  That’s my swarry.  You’ll find someone as will suit you before long.”

“No I shan’t,” says he.  “I’ve come across a few as might, if it ’adn’t been for ’er.  It’s like the toffs as come out our way.  They’ve been brought up on ‘ris de veau a la financier,’ and sich like, and it just spoils ’em for the bacon and greens.”

I give her the office the next time I see her, and they met accidental like in Kensington Gardens early one morning.  What they said to one another I don’t know, for he sailed that same evening, and, it being the end of the season, I didn’t see her ladyship again for a long while.