Nancy obeyed the summons with alacrity. She could not help a slight start as she saw her mistress, looking like ’the picture of an angel’ as she afterwards described it, in her loose white dressing-gown, with all her hair untwisted and floating over her shoulders. She had never seen any human creature quite so lovely.
“Do you know where my dresses are, Nancy?” enquired Maryllia.
“Yes, Miss. Mrs. Spruce unpacked everything herself, and the dresses are all hanging in this wardrobe.” Here Nancy went to the piece of furniture in question. “Which one shall I give you, Miss?”
Maryllia came to her side, and looked scrutinisingly at all the graceful Parisian and Viennese flimsies that hung in an. orderly row within the wardrobe, uncertain which to take. At last she settled on an exceedingly simple white tea-gown, shaped after a Greek model, and wholly untrimmed, save for a small square gold band at the throat.
“This will do!” she decided; “Nobody’s coming to dine; I shall be all alone—”
The thought struck her as quaint and strange. Nobody coming to dinner! How very odd! At Aunt Emily’s there was always someone, or several someones, to dinner. To-night she would dine all alone. Well! It would be a novel experience!
“Are there any nice people living about here?” she asked Nancy, as that anxious young woman carefully divested her of her elegant dressing-gown; “People I should like to know?”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Miss,” replied Nancy, quite frankly, watching in wonder the dexterity and grace with which her mistress swept up all her hair into one rich twist and knotted it with two big tortoiseshell hairpins at the back of her head. “There’s Sir Morton Pippitt at Badsworth Hall, three miles from here—”
Maryllia laughed gaily.
“Sir Morton Pippitt! What a funny name! Who is he?”
“Well, Miss, they do say he makes his money at bone-melting; but he’s awful proud for all that—awful proud he is—”
“Well, I should think so!” said Maryllia, with much solemnity; “Bone-melting is a great business! Does he melt human bones, Nancy?”
“Oh, lor’, Miss, no!” And Nancy laughed, despite herself; “Not that I’ve ever heard on—it’s bones of animals he melts and turns into buttons and such-like.”
“Man is an animal, Nancy,” said Maryllia, sententiously, giving one or two little artistic touches to the loose waves of hair on her forehead; “Why should not his bones be turned into buttons? Why should he not be made useful? You may depend upon it, Nancy, human bones go into Sir Morton What’s-his-name’s stock-pot. I shouldn’t wonder if he had left his own bones to his business in his will!
“’Imperial
Caesar dead and turned to clay, May stop a hole to
keep the wind
away!’
That’s so, Nancy! And is the gentleman who boils bones the only man about here one could ask to dinner?”