t you to be all right, from head to feet--different
from any of the other maids."

I didn't doubt that I would be different--very different.

Tap, tap, a knock at the door.

"Ontray!" cried her ladyship.

The door opened. Mr. Herbert Stokes stood on the threshold.

"I say, Lady T--" he began, when he saw the scarlet vision, and stopped.

"What is it?" inquired the wife of his stepfather--rather a complicated
relation.

"I--er--wanted--" drawled Bertie. "But it doesn't matter. Another
time."

"You needn't mind _her_," said Lady Turnour, with a nod toward me. "It's
only my maid. I'm giving her a dress for the servants' ball to-night."

Bertie gave vent to the ghost of a whistle, below his breath. He looked
at me, twisting the end of his small fair moustache, as he had looked at
Jack Dane last night; and though his expression was different, I liked
it no better.

"Thought it was a new guest," said he.

"I suppose you didn't take her for a lady, did you?" my mistress was
curious to know. "You pride yourself on your discrimination, your
stepfather says."

"There's nothing the matter with my discrimination," replied the young
man, smiling. But his smile was not for her ladyship. It was for me; and
it was meant to be a piquant little secret between us two.

How well I remembered asking the chauffeur, "_Could_ you know a Bertie?"
And how he answered that he had known one, and consequently didn't want
to know another. Here was the same Bertie; and now that I too knew him,
I thought I would prefer to know another, rather than know more of him.
Yet he was good-looking, almost handsome. He had short, curly light
hair, eyes as blue as turquoises, seen by daylight, full red lips under
the little moustache, a white forehead, a dimple in the chin, and a very
good figure. He had also an educated, perhaps too well educated, voice,
which tried to advertise that it had been made at Oxford; and he had
hands as carefully kept as a pretty woman's, with manicured,
filbert-shaped nails.

"You're making her jolly smart," he went on. "She'll do you credit."

"I want she should," retorted her ladyship, gratified and ungrammatical.

"She must give me a dance--what?" condescended the gilded youth. "Does
she speak English?"

"Yes. So you'd better be careful what you say before her."

Bertie telegraphed another smile to me. I looked at the faded damask
curtains; at the mantelpiece with its gilded clock and two side-pieces,
Louis