Miss Merivales Mistake | Page 2

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 Jephson's, a clergyman's widow; but the arrangement did not somehow prove a satisfactory one, and it was a relief to them both when Clare Desborough, whose old admiration for Pauline had revived on meeting her in London, had begged her to share the little flat her mother had