Miss Merivales Mistake | Page 2

that I am. Come out with me while I
light it, Rosamunda mia. And you shall make the tea. I never can
remember how many spoonfuls to put in. How pretty you look in blue!
I wish I was eighteen, with hair the colour of ripe wheat, then I would
wear blue too."
She went off, laughing, with Rose to the tiny kitchen on the other side
of the passage. The sitting-room was the largest room in the little
Chelsea flat, and that was smaller than any of the rooms at Woodcote;
but the diminutive dimensions of the place only added to the
fascinations of it in Rose's eyes.

As she took the cups and saucers down from the toy-like dresser and
put them on the lilliputian table between the gas stove and the door, she
felt a thrill of ineffable pleasure.
"Oh, Pauline, I wish I lived here with you. It's so dull at Woodcote.
And it seems to get duller every day."
"Poor little Rose, it must be dull for you. Clare and I often talk of you
with pity. Clare pities you the most. A fellow-feeling makes us
wondrous kind, you know. She will have to go back to Desborough
Park when her mother returns, I suppose. The flat is only rented for six
months. I wish"--She stopped to take off the lid of the tea-kettle and
peer earnestly in. "When a kettle boils, little bubbles come to the top,
don't they? I have got a notebook where I write down interesting little
details of that sort. They will come useful by and by, if I have to live in
a flat by myself. I shouldn't be able to keep a regular servant."
"But a regular servant would spoil it all, even if you could afford it,"
said Rose, with sparkling eyes. "We couldn't come out here and get tea
like this, if you had a servant, Pauline.".
"She would have to stand in the passage, wouldn't she?" said Pauline,
looking round the tiny kitchen, with a laugh. "But how would you like
to get tea for yourself every day, little Rose? Clare seems to like it,
though. Her mother wanted Mrs. Richards to stay with us all day, but
Clare begged that she might go at three o'clock. And Clare is
maid-of-all-work after that. It seems to come natural to her to know
what kitchen things are meant for. Now, if you will make the tea, we
will go back to your aunt. This kettle is certainly boiling at last."
Rose carefully measured the tea into the pretty Japanese teapot. Pauline
leant against the dresser and watched her with her hands clasped at the
back of her head. Pauline was not pretty,--her features were badly cut
and her skin was sallow,--but she made a pretty picture standing there.
Her dress of ruddy brown was made in a graceful, artistic fashion, and
was just the right colour to set off her dark eyes and dark, wavy hair.
Rose thought her friend beautiful. She had adored her from the first day
they met, when Pauline was junior English governess at Miss Jephson's

Collegiate School for Young Ladies at Brighton, and Rose was a
frightened, lonely, homesick child of fourteen, tasting her first
experience of boarding-school.
Pauline had had many adorers among the younger girls, and a holiday
rarely passed without her receiving some delightful invitations. It was
spitefully noticed by the senior English governess that she was very
rarely invited twice to the same house; but after Rose came to the
school, it became a matter of course that Pauline should spend her
holidays at Woodcote. She had no home of her own, as she often sadly
told the girls. She very seldom said more than that, but it was
understood in the school that the seal ring she wore at her watch-chain
belonged to her father, one of the Norfolk Smythes; and the beautiful
woman with powdered hair, whose miniature hung in her bedroom, was
her great-grandmother, the Marquise de Villeroy, who perished on the
scaffold during the Reign of Terror.
It was considered a high privilege by Pauline's band of worshippers to
be allowed to hold this miniature in their hands; but on Rose a still
higher privilege had been once conferred. She had worn the miniature
tied round her neck by a blue ribbon when she acted a part in the
French play Miss Jephson's pupils produced every Christmas. That was
in Rose's last year at school. She left at the end of the next term, as her
aunt was in failing health and wanted her at home.
Soon Pauline left too, and after a brief experience as a private
governess, commenced to give visiting lessons in London. She lived at
first with a cousin of Miss