E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) THE CONVERT * * * * * Transcriber's note: Lists of Macmillan titles from this spot have been moved to the end of the text. Following the moved section, the reader will find a list of corrections made to the text. * * * * * THE CONVERT by ELIZABETH ROBINS Author of "A Dark Lantern," "The Magnetic North," Etc. New York The MacMillan Company 1913 All rights reserved Copyright, 1907, by the MacMillan Company. Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1907. Reprinted March, 1910; March, 1912; August, 1913. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. THE CONVERT CHAPTER I The tall young lady who arrived fifteen minutes before the Freddy Tunbridges' dinner-hour, was not taken into the great empty drawing-room, but, as though she were not to be of the party expected that night, straight upstairs she went behind the footman, and then up more stairs behind a maid. The smart, white-capped domestic paused, and her floating muslin streamers cut short their aerial gyrations subsiding against her straight black back as she knocked at the night-nursery door. It was opened by a middle-aged head nurse of impressive demeanour. She stood there an instant eyeing the intruder with the kind of overbearing hauteur that in these days does duty as the peculiar hall-mark of the upper servant, being seldom encountered in England among even the older generation of the so-called governing class. 'It's too late to see the baby, miss. He's asleep.' 'Yes, I know; but the others are expecting me, aren't they?' Question hardly necessary, perhaps, with the air full of cries from beyond the screen: 'Yes, yes.' 'We're waiting!' 'Mummy promised'--cut short by the nurse saying sharply, 'Not so much noise, Miss Sara.' But the presiding genius of the Tunbridge nursery opened the door a little wider and stood aside. Handsome compensation for her studied coldness was offered in the shrill shrieks of joy with which a little girl and a very small boy celebrated the lady's entrance. She, for her part, joined the austere nurse in saying, 'Sh! sh!' and in simulating consternation at the spectacle behind the screen, Miss Sara jumping up and down in the middle of her bed with wild brown hair swirling madly about a laughing but mutinous face. The visitor, hurrying forward, received the impetuous little girl in her arms, while the nurse described her own sentiments of horror and detestation of such performances, and hinted vaguely at Retribution that might with safety be looked for no later than the morrow. Nobody listened. Miss Levering nodded smiling across Sara's nightgowned figure to the little boy hanging over the side of the neighbouring cot. But he kept remonstrating, 'You always go to her first.'