"You
catched me all of a heap or I wouldn't o' let that feller slam yer
things into the house and git away. You'll have to wait till I call
Miss Hampshire. _She'll_ talk to you."
"Tell her I was recommended by Miss Ellis, from London who boarded
here three years ago," Win desperately tossed after a disappearing
figure.
It was a mortifying commentary upon her personal appearance not to be
invited to wait in the drawing-room, and Miss Child wondered what
foreign strangeness in hat, hair arrangement, or costume had excited
suspicion. She did not know whether to be more angry or amused, but
recalled her own motto, "Laugh at the world to keep it from laughing
first."
Suddenly the episode became part of an adventure, a great and wildly
funny adventure, of which she was dying to see the next part. How she
would love to tell Mr. Balm of Gilead! How his eyes would twinkle!
But--there was no Mr. Balm of Gilead in this or any world. It was a
dreary hall she stood in, with varnished brown paper pretending to be
oak panels, a long-armed hatrack that would have made an ideal
scarecrow, and ghosts of past dinners floating up from below with
gloomy warnings.
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