"Do you know where your mamma is, Miss Trot?" asked the servant, putting a chair. "You can go and search for her?" She looked at me so intently as the maid left the room, that I told her who I was, and what I had come for. The child's tongue--it seemed as sharp a one as Miss Cattledon's--was let loose. "I have heard of you, Johnny Ludlow. Mrs. Smith would be glad to see you. You had better wait." I don't know how it is that I make myself at home with people; or, rather, that people seem so soon to be at home with me. I don't _try_ to do it, but it is always so. In two or three minutes, when the girl was talking to me as freely as though I were her brother, the maid came back again. "Miss Trot, I cannot find your mamma." "Mrs. Smith's out. But I was not obliged to tell you so. I'll not spare you any work when you call me Miss Trot." The maid's only answer was to leave the room: and the little girl--who spoke like a woman--shook her dark hair from her face in temper. "I've told them over and over again I will not be called Miss Trot. How would you like it? Because my mamma took to say it when I was a baby, it is no reason why other people should say it." "Perhaps your mamma says it still, and so they fall into it also." "My mamma is dead." Just at the moment I did not take in the meaning of the words. "Mrs. Smith dead!" "Mrs. Smith is not my mother. Don't insult me, please. She came here as my governess. If papa chose to make a fool of himself by marrying her afterwards, it was not my fault. What are you looking at?" I was looking at her: she seemed so strange a child; and feeling slightly puzzled between the other Mrs. Smith and this one. They say I am a muff at many things; I am sure I am at understanding complicated relationships. "Then--Miss Chalk is--_this_ Mrs. Smith's sister?" "Well, you might know that. They are a pair, and I don't like either of them. There are two crying babies upstairs now." "Mrs. Smith's?" "Yes, Mrs. Smith's"--with intense aggravation. "Papa had quite enough with me, and I could have managed the house and servants as well as _she_ does. And because Nancy Chalk was not enough, in addition we must be never safe from Sophonisba! Oh, there are crosses in life!" "Who is Sophonisba?" "She is Sophonisba." "Perhaps you mean Sophie Chalk?" "Her name's not Sophie, or Sophia either. She was christened Sophonisba, but she hates the name, and takes care to drop it always. She is a deep one, is Sophonisba Chalk!" "Is this her home?" "She makes it her home, when she's not out teaching. And papa never seems to think it an encroachment. Sophonisba Chalk does not keep her places, you know. She thought she had got into something fine last autumn at Lord Augustus Difford's, but Lady Augustus gave her warning at the first month's end." "Then Miss Chalk is a governess?"