The door was open between her bedroom and the sitting-room.  Waiting in the former I could hear voices in the latter.  Lady Turnour and her husband were talking about the arrival of the stepson whose name, I soon gleaned from their conversation, is Herbert.  Naturally, it would be.  People like that are always named Herbert, and are familiarly known to those whom they may concern as “Bertie.”

Presently, her ladyship came into the bedroom, and said, as a queen might say to her tirewoman, “Put me into my dressing-gown.”  If there were a feminine word for “sirrah,” I think she would have liked to call me it.

My eye, roving distractedly, pounced upon a gold-embroidered, purple silk kimono, perhaps more appropriate to Pooh-Bah than to a stout English lady of the lower middle class.  I released it from its hook on the door, and would that her ladyship had been as easy to release from her bodice!

She had not one hook, but many; and they were all so incredibly tight that, to put her into the dressing-gown as ordered, I feared it would be necessary to melt and pour her out of the gown she had on.

While I wrestled, silent and red faced, with a bodice as snug as the head of a drum, the lord of all it contained appeared in the doorway, and stopped, looking at me in surprise.

He is common, too, this Sir Samuel, millionaire maker of pills; but he is common in a good, almost pathetic way, quite different from his wife’s way—­or Monsieur Charretier’s.  He has stick-up gray hair curling all over his round head, blue eyes, twinkling with a mild, yet shrewd expression (which might be merry if encouraged by her ladyship), and a large, slouching body with stooped shoulders.

“What young lady have we here?” he inquired.

“Not a young lady at all,” explained his wife sharply.  “My new French maid.”

“I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” said Sir Samuel, though it wasn’t quite clear whether it was my forgiveness or that of his spouse he craved, for his mistake in supposing me to be a “young lady.”

“What’s her name?” he wanted to know, evidently approving of me, if not as a maid, at least as a human being.

“Something ridiculous in French that sounds like ‘Liz,’” sniffed her ladyship.  “But I shall call her Elise.  Also I shall expect her to stop dyeing her hair.”

“But, madame, I do not dye it!” I exclaimed.

“Don’t tell me.  I know dyed hair when I see it.”

(She ought to, having experience enough with her own!)

“Nature is the dyer, then,” I ventured to persist, piqued to self-defence by the certainty that her object was to strip me of my wicked mask before her husband.

“I’m not used to being contradicted by my servants,” her ladyship reminded me.

“My dear, do let the poor girl know whether she dyes her hair or not.”  Sir Samuel pleaded for me with more kindness than discretion.  “I’m sure she speaks beautiful English.”