The maid took the dressing-jacket and the torn lace down-stairs.
Inspecting them, she found the damage not irreparable. The rents might
be temporarily concealed from the unseeing eyes of man. But it would
take time. She was busy, in the midst of some work for her mistress.
Human nature asserting itself, she dratted Constable. On her way to her
room she glanced out of a window that overlooked the lawn. There, in the
May sunshine, sat Unity, hemming dusters. Now, Unity was made for higher
things of the needle than dusters. She had a genius for needlework. The
maid knew it. In a few moments, therefore, Unity had exchanged the dull
duster for the exquisite and thrilling garment, warm from the sweet body
of the Lady of Mystery herself. The maid brought the necessary battery
of implements with which such delicate repairs are executed, and left an
enraptured orphan on a rustic bench.
Unity set to work. The mending of torn lace is a ticklish affair under
the most prosaic of conditions: when goddesses and fairy-princesses and
Stellamarises are mixed up in it, the occupation absorbs mind and soul.
Unity's first awakening to the fact of an outside world was effected by
a huge, grayish blue head thrust between her face and her needle. It was
Constable, who had been let loose for his morning frisk. She pushed him
away. Even the most majestic of Great Danes is moist about the jowl.
Suppose he dribbled on the sacred vesture! Marrow-freezing possibility!
She held his head at arm's length, and bade him begone. But Constable
broke through her puny restraint and sniffed at the dressing-jacket.
He sniffed at it in so insistent and truculent a manner that Unity grew
frightened. She held the dressing-jacket high in the air.