taphorical shaking of a bony fist in the face of the day, as much as
to say, 'If I admit you here you'll have to toe the mark!'

It might be taken as proof of sound nerves that the lady in the bed
offered no remonstrance at being jarred awake in this ungentle fashion.

Fourteen years before, when Vida Levering was only eighteen, she had
tried to make something like a conventional maid out of the faithful
Northumbrian. Rachel Wark had entered Lady Levering's service just
before Vida's birth, and had helped to nurse her mistress through a
mortal illness ten years later. After Sir Hervey Levering lost his wife,
Wark became in time housekeeper and general factotum to the family. This
arrangement held without a break until, as before hinted, Miss Vida,
full of the hopeful idealism of early youth, had tried and ignominiously
failed in her attempt to teach the woman gentler manners.

For Wark's characteristic retort had been to pack her box and go to
spend sixteen months among her kinsfolk, where energy was accounted a
virtue, and smooth ways held in suspicion. At the end of that time,
seeming to judge the lesson she wished to impart had been sufficiently
digested, Wark wrote to Miss Vida proposing to come back. For some
months she waited for the answer. It came at last from Biarritz, where
it appeared the young lady was spending the winter with her father.
After an exchange of letters Wark joined them there. In the twelve
years since her return to the family, she had by degrees adapted herself
to the task of looking after her young lady. The adaptation was not all
on one side. Many of Vida's friends wondered that she could put up with
a lady's maid who could do so few of the things commonly expected of
that accomplished class.

'I don't want dressmaking going on in the house,' contentedly Vida told
off her maid's negative qualifications, 'and I hate having anybody do my
hair for me. Wark packs quite beautifully, and then I _do_ like some one
about me--that I like.'

In the early days what she had 'liked' most about the woman was that
Wark had known and been attached to Lady Levering. There was no one else
with whom Vida could talk about her mother.

By the time death overtook Sir Hervey two winters ago in Rome, Wark had
become so essential a part of Vida's little entourage, that one of the
excuses offered by that lady for not going to live with her half-sister
in London had been--'Wark doesn't always get on with other se