“Good for you, you dear, brave, blessed ace of hearts in a world where hearts are trumps!  If you ain’t one of the right old girls, then they don’t make ’em, and never did!”

CHAPTER XXI.

VOICES AND VISIONS.

Madame Bylles herself walked into the great work-room of Mesdames Fillmer & Bylles, one Saturday morning.

Madame Bylles was a lady of great girth and presence.  If Miss Tonker were sub-aristocratic, Madame Bylles was almost super-aristocratic, so cumulative had been the effect upon her style and manner of constant professional contact with the elite.  Carriages had rolled up to her door, until she had got the roll of them into her very voice.  Airs and graces had swept in and out of her private audience-room, that had not been able to take all of themselves away again.  As the very dust grows golden and precious where certain workmanship is carried on, the touch and step and speech of those who had come ordering, consulting, coaxing, beseeching, to her apartments, had filled them with infinitesimal particles of a sublime efflorescence, by which the air itself in which they floated became—­not the air of shop or business or down-town street—­but the air of drawing-room, and bon-ton, and Beacon Hill or the New Land.

And Madame Bylles breathed it all the time; she dwelt in the courtly contagion.  When she came in among her work-people, it was an advent of awe.  It was as if all the elegance that had ever been made up there came floating and spreading and shining in, on one portly and magnificent person.

But when Madame Bylles came in, in one of her majestic hurries!  Then it was as if the globe itself had orders to move on a little faster, and make out the year in two hundred and eighty days or so, and she was appointed to see it done.

She was in one of these grand and grave accelerations this morning.  Miss Pashaw’s marriage was fixed for a fortnight earlier than had been intended, business calling Mr. Soldane abroad.  There were dresses to be hurried; work for over-hours was to be given out.  Miss Tonker was to use every exertion; temporary hands, if reliable, might be employed.  All must be ready by Thursday next; Madame Bylles had given her word for it.

The manner in which she loftily transmitted this grand intelligence, warm from the high-born lips that had favored her with the confidence,—­the air of intending it for Miss Tonker’s secondarily distinguished ear alone, while the carriage-roll in her accents bore it to the farthest corner in the room, where the meekest little woman sat basting,—­these things are indescribable.  But they are in human nature:  you can call them up and scrutinize them for yourself.

Madame Bylles receded like a tidal wave, having heaved up, and changed, and overwhelmed all things.

A great buzz succeeded her departure; Miss Tonker followed her out upon the landing.