As they spun along toward home through the cooling air, Miss Frazier’s expression grew happier and happier. Kate had done for her what she could not do for herself: lightened real suspicions, and eased her heart.
It was almost dinner time when they arrived. If Kate was to don her pink organdie she would have to hurry. She raced up the stairs and found Bertha in her room waiting for her.
“You have only ten minutes, Miss Kate,” she warned. “Your bath is set.”
A glance showed Kate the pink organdie freshly pressed, crisp and cool, hung over a chair back, and the white slip to go under it on the bed. Her pumps were set down by the dressing table and some fresh stockings near on a stool. Two baths a day! How comfortable! Kate, still aglow with her afternoon, had quite forgotten her self-consciousness with this lady’s maid.
Bertha answered rather worriedly: “No, and none of us have seen her all afternoon. I do wish she would come up. I can’t think how she’s been amusing herself, or where.”
Kate herself began to wonder, when she had had her bath and was freshly dressed. “There’s the gong!” she exclaimed.
But simultaneously with the note of the gong Elsie’s door slammed and there she was in the bathroom door.
“I’m late,” she called, but not at all ruefully. “No time to dress, Bertha. Hello, Kate.”
“You’ll have to wash your face, whether there’s time or not,” Bertha assured her. “And your hair, it’s a sight! Where did you get like that?”
Elsie laughed, elfin laughter. “Never mind where. And you aren’t my nurse. You’re my tiring-woman. Bear that in mind, Mrs. Bertha.”
Bertha’s worried face changed into a beaming one. Elsie in such good spirits! That was the best that Bertha asked of life, Kate intuitively felt.
But it was true enough. Elsie very much needed washing and brushing. Her nose and forehead were beaded with little drops of perspiration, her cheeks were a burning red, as though she had been sitting over a fire, or perhaps long in the sun, and there were smudges of what looked like flour on chin and arms. As for her hair, it was all in little damp curls across her brow and over her ears: one side had come completely undone, and showered down on to her shoulder.
“I can’t for the life of me see how you ever got in such a mess,” Bertha murmured happily as she officiated in Elsie’s hurried cleaning up. “You might just as well be a cook in a kitchen! But, oh, dear! What’s that burn?”