The darkness and the quiet of Vida Levering's bedroom were rudely dispelled at a punctual eight each morning by the entrance of a gaunt middle-aged female.

It was this person's unvarying custom to fling back the heavy curtains, as though it gratified some strong recurrent need in her, to hear brass rings run squealing along a bar; as if she counted that day lost which was not well begun—by shooting the blinds up with a clatter and a bang!

The harsh ceremonial served as a sort of setting of the pace, or a metaphorical shaking of a bony fist in the face of the day, as much as to say, 'If I admit you here you'll have to toe the mark!'

It might be taken as proof of sound nerves that the lady in the bed offered no remonstrance at being jarred awake in this ungentle fashion.

Fourteen years before, when Vida Levering was only eighteen, she had tried to make something like a conventional maid out of the faithful Northumbrian. Rachel Wark had entered Lady Levering's service just before Vida's birth, and had helped to nurse her mistress through a mortal illness ten years later. After Sir Hervey Levering lost his wife, Wark became in time housekeeper and general factotum to the family. This arrangement held without a break until, as before hinted, Miss Vida, full of the hopeful idealism of early youth, had tried and ignominiously failed in her attempt to teach the woman gentler manners.

For Wark's characteristic retort had been to pack her box and go to spend sixteen months among her kinsfolk, where energy was accounted a virtue, and smooth ways held in suspicion. At the end of that time, seeming to judge the lesson she wished to impart had been sufficiently digested, Wark wrote to Miss Vida proposing to come back. For some months she waited for the answer. It came at last from Biarritz, where it appeared the young lady was spending the winter with her father. After an exchange of letters Wark joined them there. In the twelve years since her return to the family, she had by degrees adapted herself to the task of looking after her young lady. The adaptation was not all on one side. Many of Vida's friends wondered that she could put up with a lady's maid who could do so few of the things commonly expected of that accomplished class.

'I don't want dressmaking going on in the house,' contentedly Vida told off her maid's negative qualifications, 'and I hate having anybody do my hair for me. Wark packs quite beautifully, and then I do like some one about me—that I like.'

In the early days what she had 'liked' most about the woman was that Wark had known and been attached to Lady Levering. There was no one else with whom Vida could talk about her mother.

By the time death overtook Sir Hervey two winters ago in Rome, Wark had become so essential a part of Vida's little entourage, that one of the excuses offered by that lady for not going to live with her half-sister in London had been—'Wark doesn't always get on with other servants.' For several years Miss Levering's friends had been speaking of her as one fallen a victim to that passion for Italy that makes it an abiding place dearer than home to so many English-born. But the half-sister, Mrs. Fox-Moore, had not been misled either by that theory or by the difficulty as to pleasing Wark with the Queen Anne's Gate servants. 'It's not that Vida loves Italy so much as that, for some reason, she doesn't love England at all.' Nevertheless, Mrs. Fox-Moore after some months had persuaded her to 'bring Wark and try us.'

The experiment, now over a year old, seemed to have turned out well. If Vida really did not love her native land, she seemed to enjoy well enough what she called smiling 'the St. Martin's Summer' of her success in London society.

She turned over in her bed on this particular May morning, stretching out her long figure, and then letting it sink luxuriously back into relaxed quiescence with a conscious joy in prolonging those last ten minutes when sleep is slowly, softly, one after another, withdrawing her thousand veils.

Vaguely, as she lay there with face half buried in her pillow, vaguely she was aware that Wark was making even more noise than common.

When the woman had bustled in and bustled out several times, and deposited the shoes with a 'dump,' she reappeared with the delicate porcelain tray that bore the early tea. On the little table close to where the dark head lay half hidden, Wark set the fragile burden down—did it with an emphasis that made cup and saucer shiver and run for support towards the round-bellied pot.

Vida opened her heavy-lidded eyes. 'Really, Wark, you know, nobody on earth would let you wake them in the morning except me.' She sat up and pulled the pillow higher. 'Give me the tray here,' she said sleepily.

Wark obeyed. She had said nothing to Vida's reproof. She stood now by the bedside without a trace of either contrition or resentment in the wooden face that seemed, in recompense for never having been young, to be able successfully to defy the 'antique pencil.' Time had made but one or two faint ineffectual scratches there, as one who tries, and then abandons, an unpromising surface. The lack of record in the face lent it something almost cryptic. If there were no laughter-wrought lines about the eyes, neither was there mark of grief or self-repression near the mouth. She would, you felt, defy Time as successfully as she defied lesser foes. Even the lank, straw-coloured hair hardly showed the streaks of yellow-white that offered their unemphatic clue to Wark's age.

The sensitive face of the woman in the bed—even now with something of the peace of sleep still shadowing its brilliancy—gave by contrast an impression of vividness and eager sympathies. The mistress, too, looked younger than her years. She did not seem to wonder at the dull presence that seemed to be held there, prisoner-like, behind the brass bars at the foot of the bed. Wark sometimes gave herself this five minutes' tÊte-À-tÊte with her mistress before the business of the day began and all their intercourse was swamped in clothes.

'I meant to pin a paper on the door to say I wasn't to be called till ten,' said the lady, as though keeping up the little pretence of not being pleased.

'Didn't you sleep well, 'm?' The maid managed wholly to denude the question of its usual grace of solicitude.

'Yes; but it was so late when I began. We didn't get back till nearly three.'

'I didn't get much sleep, either.' It was an unheard-of admission from Wark.

'Oh!' said Vida, lazily sipping her tea. 'Bad conscience?'

'No,' she said slowly, 'no.'

As the woman raised her light eyes, Miss Levering saw, to her astonishment, that the lids were red. Wark, too, seemed uncomfortably aware of something unusual in her face, for she turned it away, and busied herself in smoothing down the near corner of the bath blanket.

'What kept you awake?' Miss Levering asked.

'Well, I suppose I'd better tell you while the other people aren't round. I want a day or two to go into the country.'

'Into the country?' No such request had been heard for a round dozen of years.

'I've got some business to see to.'

'At home? In Northumberland?'

'No.'

The tone seemed so little to promise anything in the nature of a confidence that Miss Levering merely said—

'Oh, very well. When do you want to go?'

'I could go to-morrow if——' She stopped, and looked down at the hem of her long white apron.

Something unwonted in the wooden face prompted Miss Levering to say—

'What do you want to do in the country?'

'To see about a place that's been offered me.'

'A place, Wark!'

'Yes; post of housekeeper. That's what I really am, you know.'

Miss Levering looked at her, and set down the half-finished cup without opening her lips. If the speech had come from any other than Wark, it would have been easy to believe it merely the prelude to complaint of a fellow-servant or plea for a rise in wages. But if Wark objected to a fellow-servant, her own view of the matter had always been that the other one should go. Her mistress knew quite well that in the mouth of the woman standing there with red eyes at the foot of the bed, such an announcement as had just been made, meant more. And the consciousness seemed to bring with it a sense of acute discomfort not unmixed with anger. For there was a threat of something worse than an infliction of mere inconvenience. It was a species of desertion. It was almost treachery. They had lived together all the younger woman's life, except for those two years that followed on the girl's attempt to make a conventional servant out of a creature who couldn't be that, but who had it in her to be more.

They had been too long together for Wark not to divine something—through all the lady's self-possession—of her sense of being abandoned.

'It's having to tell you that that kept me awake.'

The wave of dull colour that mounted up to the bushy, straw-coloured eyebrows seemed on the way to have overflowed into her eyes. They grew redder than before, and slowly they filled.

'You don't like living here in this house.' Vida caught at the old complication.

'I've got used to it,' the woman said baldly. Then, after a little pause, during which she made a barely audible rasping to clear her throat, 'I don't like leaving you, miss. I always remember how, that time before—the only time I was ever away from you since you was a baby—how different I found you when I came back.'

'Different, Wark?'

'Yes, miss. It seemed like you'd turned into somebody else.'

'Most people change—develope—in those years just before twenty.'

'Not like you did, miss. You gave me a deal of trouble when you was little, but it nearly broke my heart to come back and find you so quieted down and wise-like.'

A flash of tears glimmered in the mistress's eyes, though her lips were smiling.

'Of course,' the maid went on, 'though you never told me about it, I know you had things to bear while I was away, or else you wouldn't have gone away from your home that time—a mere child—and tried to teach for a living.'

'It was absurd of me! But whosever fault it was, it wasn't yours.'

'Yes, miss, in a way it was. I owed it to your mother not to have left you. I've never told you how I blamed myself when I heard—and I didn't wonder at you. It was hard when your mother was hardly cold to see your father——'

'Yes; now that's enough, Wark. You know we never speak of that.'

'No, we've never spoken about it. And, of course, you won't need me any more like you did then. But it's looking back and remembering—it's that that's making it so hard to leave you now. But——'

'Well?'

'My friends have been talking to me.'

'About——'

'Yes, this post.' Then, almost angrily, 'I didn't try for it. It's come after me. My cousin knows the man.'

'The man who wants you to go to him as housekeeper?' Vida wrinkled her brows. Wark hadn't said 'gentleman,' who alone in her employer's experience had any need of a housekeeper. 'You mean you don't know him yourself?'

'Not yet, 'm. I know he's a market gardener, and he wants his house looked after.'

'What if he does? A market gardener won't be able to pay the wages I——'

'The wages aren't much to begin with—but he's getting along—except for the housekeeping. That's in a bad way.'

'What if it is? I never heard such nonsense. You don't want to leave me, Wark, for a market gardener you've never so much as seen;' and Miss Levering covered her discomfort by a little smiling.

'My cousin's seen him many a time. She likes him.'

'Let your cousin go, then, and keep his house for him.'

'My cousin has her own house to keep, and she's got a young baby.'

'Oh, the woman who brought her child here once?'

'Yes, 'm, the child you gave the coral beads to. My cousin has written and talked about it ever since.'

'About the beads?'

'About the market gardener. And the way his house is—Ever since we came back to England she's been going on at me about it. I told her all along I couldn't leave you, but she's always said (since that day you walked about with the baby and gave him the beads to play with, and wouldn't let her make him cry by taking them away)—ever since then my cousin has said you'd understand.'

'What would I understand?'

Wark laid her hand on the nearest of the shining bars of brass, and slowly she polished it with her open palm. She obviously found it difficult to go on with her defence.

'I wanted my cousin to come and explain to you.'

Here was Wark in a new light indeed! If she really wanted any creature on the earth to speak for her. As she stood there in stolid embarrassment polishing the shiny bar, Miss Levering clutched the tray to steady it, and with the other hand she pulled the pillow higher. One had to sit bolt upright, it seemed, and give this matter one's entire attention.

'I don't want to talk to your cousin about your affairs. We are old friends, Wark. Tell me yourself.'

She forced her eyes to meet her mistress's. 'He told my cousin: "Just you find me a good housekeeper," he said, "and if I like her," he said, "she won't be my housekeeper long."'

'Wark! You! You aren't thinking of marrying?'

'If he's what my cousin says——'

'A man you've never seen? Oh, my dear Wark! Well, I shall hope and pray he won't think your housekeeping good enough.'

'He will! From what my cousin says, he's had a run of worthless huzzies. I don't expect he'll find much fault with my housekeeping after what he's been through.'

Vida looked wondering at the triumphant face of the woman.

'And so you're ready to leave me after all these years?'

'No, miss, I'm not to say "ready," but I think I'll have to go.'

'My poor old Wark'—the lady leaned over the tray—'I could almost think you are in love with this man you've only heard about!'

'No, miss, I'm not to say in love.'

'I believe you are! For what other reason would you have for leaving me?'

The woman looked as if she could show cause had she a mind. But she said nothing.

'You know,' Vida pursued—'you know quite well you don't need to marry for a home.'

'No, 'm; I'm quite comfortable, of course, with you. But time goes on. I don't get younger.'

'None of us do that, Wark.'

'That's just the trouble, miss. It ain't only me.'

Vida looked at her, more perplexed than ever by the curious regard in the hard-featured countenance. For there was something very like dumb reproach in Wark's face.

'Still,' said Miss Levering, 'you know, even if none of us do get younger, we are not any of us (to judge by appearances) on the brink of the grave. Even if I should be smashed up in a motor accident—I know you're always expecting that—even if I were killed to-morrow, still you'd find I hadn't forgotten you, Wark.'

'It isn't that, miss. It isn't death I'm afraid of.'

There was a pause—the longest that yet had come.

'What are you afraid of?' Miss Levering asked.

'It's—you see, I've been looking these twelve years to see you married.'

'Me? What's that got to do with——'

'Yes, miss. You see, I've counted a good while on looking after children again some day. But if you won't get married——'

Vida flung her hair back with a burst of not very merry laughter.

'If I won't, you must! But why in the world? I'd no idea you were so romantic. Why must there be a wedding in the family, Wark?'

'So there can be children, miss,' said the woman, stolidly.

'Well, there is a child. There's Doris.'

'Poor Miss Doris!' The woman shook her head. 'But she's got a good nurse. I say it, though she calls advice interfering. And Miss Doris has got a mother' (plain that Wark was again in the market garden). 'Yes, she's got a mother! and a sort of a father, and she's got a governess, and a servant to carry her about. I sometimes think what Miss Doris needs most is a little letting alone. Leastways, she don't need me. No, nor you, miss.'

'And you've given me up?' the mistress probed.

Wark raised her red eyes. 'Of course, miss, if I'm wrong——' Her knuckly hand slid down from the brass bar, and she came round to the side of the bed with an unmistakable eagerness in her face. 'If you're going to get married, I don't see as I could leave ye.'

The lady's lips twitched with an instant's silent laughter, but there was something else than laughter in her eyes.

'Oh, I can buy you off, can I? If I give you my word—if to save you from need to try the great experiment, I'll sacrifice myself——'

'I wouldn't like to see you make a sacrifice, miss,' Wark said, with perfect gravity. 'But'—as though reconsidering—'you wouldn't feel it so much, I dare say, after the child was there.'

They looked at one another.

'If it's children you yearn for, my poor Wark, you've waited too long, I'm afraid.'

'Oh, no, miss.' She spoke with a fatuous confidence.

'Why, you must be fifty.'

'Fifty-three, miss. But'—she met her mistress's eye unflinching—'Bunting—he's the market gardener—he's been married before. He's got three girls and two boys.'

'Heavens!' Vida fell back against the pillow. 'What a handful!'

'Oh, no, 'm. My cousin says they're nice children.' It would have been funny if it hadn't somehow been pathetic to see how instantly she was on the defensive. '"Healthy and hearty," my cousin says, all but the little one. She hardly thinks they'll raise him.'

'Well, I wish your market gardener had confined himself to raising onions and cabbages. If he hadn't those children I don't believe you'd dream of——'

'Well, of course not, miss. But it seems like those children need some one to look after them more than—more than——'

'Than I do? That ought to be true.'

'One of 'em is little more than a baby.' The wooden woman offered it as an apology.

'Take the tray,' said Vida.

From the look on her face you would say she knew she had lost the faithfullest of servants, and that five little children somewhere in a market garden had won, if not a mother, at least a doughty champion.