London (England) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
Sally shook her head. “I’m too stupid,” she replied. “The girl who made
the hole in the water put me up to it. ‘Have you made up your mind to
run away?’ she says. And I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘You go to the man who did the
picture,’ she says; ‘he knows where the place is, I’ll be bound.’ I
asked my way till I found him. And he did know. And he told me. He was a
good sort; he gave me a glass of beer, he said I looked so tired. I said
we’d go and have our portraits taken some day--you, and your servant.
May I tell the funny old foreigner that he is to go away now I have come
to you?” The complete simplicity with which she betrayed her jealousy
of Toff made Amelius smile. Sally, watching every change in his face,
instantly drew her own conclusion. “Ah!” she said cheerfully, “I’ll keep
your room cleaner than he keeps it! I smelt dust on the curtains when I
was hiding from you.”
Amelius thought of his dream. “Did you come out while I was asleep?” he
asked.
“Yes; I wasn’t frightened of you, when you were asleep. I had a good
look at you; and I gave you a kiss.” She made that confession without
the slightest sign of confusion; her calm blue eyes looked him straight
in the face. “You got restless,” she went on; “and I got frightened
again. I put out the lamp. I says to myself, ‘If he does scold me, I can
bear it better in the dark.’”
Amelius listened, wondering. Had he seen drowsily what he thought he
had dreamed, or was there some mysterious sympathy between Sally and
himself? The occult speculations were interrupted by Sally. “May I take
off my bonnet, and make myself tidy?” she asked. Some men might have
said No. Amelius was not one of them.
The library possessed a door of communication with the sitting-room; the
bedchamber occupied by Amelius being on the other side of the cottage.
When Sally saw Toff’s reconstructed room, she stood at the door, in
speechless admiration of the vision of luxury revealed to her. From time
to time Amelius, alone in the library, heard her dabbling in her bath,
and humming the artless old English song from which she had taken her
name. Once she knocked at the closed door, and made a request through
it--“There is scent on the table; may I have some?” And once Toff
knocked at the other door, opening into the passage, and asked when
“pretty young Miss” would be ready for supper. Events went on in the
little household as if Sally had become an integral part of it already.
“What _am_ I to do?” Amelius asked himself. And Toff, entering at the
moment to lay the cloth, answered respectfully, “Hurry the young person,
sir, or the salmi will be spoilt.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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