He kissed her again. "Thelma, don't spoil me too much! If you let me have my own way to such an extent, who knows what an awful domestic tyrant I may become! No, dear--we must go tonight--there's no help for it. You see we've accepted the invitation, and it's no use being churlish. Besides, after all"--he gazed at her admiringly--"I want them to see my Norwegian rose! Come along! The carriage is waiting."
They passed out into the hall, where Britta was in attendance with a long cloak of pale-blue plush lined with white fur, in which she tenderly enveloped her beloved "Fröken," her rosy face beaming with affectionate adoration as she glanced from the fair diamond-crowned head down to the point of a small pearl-embroidered shoe that peeped beneath the edge of the rich, sheeny white robe, and saw that nothing was lacking to the most perfect toilette that ever woman wore.
"Good-night, Britta!" said Thelma kindly. "You must not sit up for me. You will be tired."
Britta smiled--it was evident she meant to outwatch the stars, if necessary, rather than allow her mistress to be unattended on her return. But she said nothing--she waited at the door while Philip assisted his wife into the carriage--and still stood musingly under the wide portico, after they had driven away.
"Hadn't you better come in, Miss Britta?" said the butler respectfully,--he had a great regard for her ladyship's little maid.
Britta, recalled to herself, started, turned, and re-entered the hall.
"There will be many fine folks there to-night, I suppose?" she asked.
The butler rubbed his nose perplexedly. "Fine folks at Winsleigh House? Well, as far as clothes go, I dare say there will. But there'll be no one like her ladyship--no one!" And he shook his grey head emphatically.
"Of course not!" said Britta, with a sort of triumphant defiance. "We know that very well, Morris! There's no one like her ladyship anywhere in the wide world! But I tell you what--I think a great many people will be jealous of her."
Morris smiled. "You may take your oath of that, Miss Britta," he said with placid conviction. "Jealous! Jealous isn't the word for it! Why," and he surveyed Britta's youthful countenance with fatherly interest, "you're only a child as it were, and you don't know the world much. Now, I've been five and twenty years in this family, and I knew Sir Philip's mother, the Lady Eulalie--he named his yacht after her. Ah! she was a sweet creature--she came from Austria, and she was as dark as her present ladyship is fair. Wherever she went, I tell you, the women were ready to cry for spite and envy of her good looks--and they would say anything against her they could invent. That's the way they go on sometimes in society, you know."