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.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25