sank into one of the arm-chairs and found it supremely comfortable. “Alterations!” she said. “I should think you have; but, tell me, was it your own idea, this room?”
“No,” said Miss Symington, looking rather affronted. “Could you imagine me thinking of anything like this? . . . I don’t know how it was, your house looked so different, but I had no idea how to set about improving mine, so I went to the best furnishing shop I knew, and they sent a man to see the house and advise me. He was quite young—he looked like an artist—and he told me this was his profession, advising people how to make their houses pretty. Isn’t that a queer profession for a young man?”
“Rather a jolly one, I think. So he thought out this scheme?”
“Yes. He said in this sort of villa there wasn’t much to work on, but he managed to change things a good deal.”
Nicole still gazed round the room. “Your young man seems to me a magician. You like it, don’t you? And is all the house changed?”
“I think I like it,” Janet said, rather doubtfully, “at least, I think the rooms that aren’t changed look odd. The dining-room is just as it was. You see, there are the preachers over the week-ends, and they might not feel at home in this sort of thing!” She waved a hand towards the new splendour of colour. “Only this room, and the lobbies and stairs, and my own room and the best spare-room are changed. You must come up and see them after you’ve had your tea.”
“But—d’you mind me asking?—what made you decide all of a sudden that the house wasn’t just as you liked it?”
Tea had been brought in and Janet was pouring it out in her deliberate way. She passed Nicole a cup, and in her slightly complaining voice said, “It was your crystal bowl that started it all.”
Nicole poured some milk into her tea and waited for enlightenment.
“On Christmas morning,” Janet went on, “I took it up to my room, and it was so useless and so pretty that my room didn’t seem the place for it at all. It made everything else look dull and ugly. I thought it was the wall-paper, and I got that changed; then the chintzes looked dingy and the carpet, and the bed, somehow, was wrong, and the light wood furniture—then I called in an expert.”
She stirred her tea in the genteel way that always amused Nicole, and sat very straight on the edge of a great comfortable chair. All round her was beauty and colour, but she was provokingly drab.
Nicole leaned forward. “There’s one thing still left to do,” she said coaxingly. “You’ve made your house beautiful, now give yourself a chance. Blue serge is very nice, but it’s not the most becoming wear for you. I want to see you in something softer—let me take the place of the furnishing young man and adorn you!”
Janet Symington flushed, pressing her lips firmly together, and Nicole cried, “I know what you’re thinking, but that seems to me such a mistake. Would God have troubled to make this world so beautiful if He had wanted us to go about all sad-hued and dreary? You simply don’t know how much harm is done by good women not knowing how to dress. I remember as a child, when I helped my mother to entertain Mothers’ Unions and Girls’ Friendlies and things like that, wondering why the best people—meaning the most serious, good people—nearly always had badly hung skirts! And to-day, when clothes are so easy and so suitable and so varied, it’s conservatism run mad not to wear what other people are wearing. You would never wear a blouse and skirt again if you knew the comfort of a little frock. You always look nice and tidy, but I could make you look so attractive. . . . Let’s go to Edinburgh and have a buy! It would be such fun. . . .”
* * * * *
About an hour later Nicole burst into the drawing-room at the Harbour House to find her mother listening to Barbara, who had just come in full of her afternoon at the Erskines’.
“I was to tell you, Nik, that they were very sorry you couldn’t come; but they quite understood that Kirkmeikle had great attractions.”
“I should think so indeed!” Nicole said, squatting down on a stool at her mother’s feet. “Kirkmeikle’s the most exciting place I ever struck. What do you think? When I went into Ravenscraig to-day I found the whole place changed as if a magician had waved a wand. Mums, you know what it looked like the first day we went to call? Lace curtains, sprawling flowery carpet, gas fire! Pouf! Gone. Now, lovely exotic colours, space—comfort. Some furnishing firm sent a man to advise, and this is the result. It’s all as modern as can be, of course, you know the sort of villa he had to cope with, but quite beautiful. The staircases are grey and powder-blue, with black-framed etchings on the walls: the best bedroom is striped grey and white with pale-yellow silk curtains: Miss Symington’s own room is prettiest of all. And the dining-room is the same old room—red leather chairs, green table-cover, aspidistra in a pot—because the preachers mightn’t feel at home if it were changed. Isn’t that delicious? Now, Babs,” to that young woman, who was standing with her coat over her arm ready to go upstairs, “tell me if your Erskines ever do delightful exciting things like that? Never!!”
CHAPTER XXII
“Why should calamity be full of words?”
King Richard III.
In the first week of March Nicole went out one day with Alastair looking for star-fish at low tide, slipped, and fell into a deep pool. Often she had done it before and had never been a penny the worse, and this time she laughed and made her wet shoes “chork” to amuse Alastair, and continued the search. But a wind came out of the east, a nipping and an eager air—and Nicole shivered and went home. The next morning she woke with a sore throat and a cough and a temperature, and it was evident that Rutherfurd would not see her that week. She admitted it herself, sitting up in bed, flushed with fever and distress at her own stupidity.
“Who would have supposed that I would take cold?” she croaked, “a thing I almost never do. And no one would want me for a visitor, coughing and sneezing and infecting everybody! I must give up the thought of Rutherfurd, and I hate to fail Mrs. Jackson when all her arrangements are made. . . . Babs, won’t you go in my place? You would be twice as useful anyway.”
“My dear, I couldn’t possibly offer myself.”
“No, but send a wire now, and if she writes suggesting you . . .”
“We’ll see,” said Barbara.
Mrs. Jackson’s letter when it came was a wail of despair. How was she to cope with her festivities with no one to stand by her to counsel and direct? What did Nicole suggest? Would Miss Burt think of coming? And Barbara, after much persuasion, consented to go.
“I’ll be a sort of death’s head at the feast,” she predicted. “You know I never can be gay to order as Nikky can. And I’ll hate the Jacksons when I see them really installed in our house. I feel already like Banquo’s ghost, or something like that.”
“You’re not ethereal enough for that,” Nicole reminded her, laughing. “I don’t see you flitting spectral fashion. . . . Oh, don’t make me laugh, for then I cough. You look so nice, my dear. Assure Mrs. Jackson that you aren’t bringing her influenza, that this is only a common chill got through wet feet in an east wind, and I’m really better already. . . . Be sure and tell me what
