Mistress of Brown Furrows Read Online Free Page A

admitted:
    “You are perfectly right.”
    “And you, my dear,” he reminded her, stretching forth a hand to persuade her to her feet, “are only eighteen, not nearly as fat as you ought to be, and I don’t think I like you in grey. So shall we get started on our shopping expedition?”
    “If—if you won’ t be bored—?” a little uncertainly.
    “I am never bored, my dear—at least, not often. And in addition to the hat I think we must definitely look for something thinner for you to wear than that heavy suit. It doesn’ t suggest a warm July day to me at all. ”
    “But I haven’ t got a great deal of money, I’ m afraid,” Carol confessed to him in anxiety. “I never had very much pocket-money, you know, and it cost me quite a lot to buy this costume. Clothes are so dreadfully expensive, aren’ t they?”
    “They certainly are,” he agreed. “But as I am to be your banker you needn’t worry about that side of the picture.” He turned to the hall porter, who was standing near. “Call me a taxi, will you please,” he ordered.
    CHAPTER FOUR
    CAROL never forgot that day. She never forgot the days which followed, and which amounted to close upon a week before a termination to their visit to London was discussed, and her first real taste of an existence apart from the ordered routine of school life brought to an end, but given a new angle.
    They went everywhere—or it seemed to Carol that they went everywhere in those few days. All the places she had read about, and wondered about, and listened to secondhand accounts of. Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, the parks, Chelsea Embankment, Tower Bridge, Richmond Park. And of course the shops. Carol was completely charmed by the shops, but the various new articles of clothing she acquired were not obtained in the great West-End stores—although their windows delighted and bewildered her—but in tucked-away little shops in Bond Street, and salubrious thoroughfares of that sort.
    Timothy Carrington said his sister, when she came to London, always dealt at these apparently modest little establishments, but Carol was frequently amazed when she saw the inside of them, and found herself walking on luxurious carpets and inhaling the perfume of exotic hothouse flowers. And the assistants were always so attentive—especially when they saw her escort—and they always had exactly the right thing that would suit her, or they took her measurements and she was assured of its being delivered within as short a time as possible.
    The first evening frock she had ever possessed in her life came home on the night she was to be taken to her first theatre. Secretly Carol was a little appalled by the amount of money her guardian was expending on this new outfit of hers; she had no idea he was going to make their shopping expedition such a wholesale one. When she remonstrated with him in her shy fashion he was inclined to treat her remonstrance with amusement, and more than once he remarked that if a man, having acquired a ward, could not feel proud of the way she looked, then it would be much better for him if he had not acquired one! And he could never have felt proud of her in that grey pudding-basin she was wearing when he first caught sight of her!
    Carol felt sure he was partly teasing, but she realized he had a critical eye for female clothes, and he was not slow to let her know when a thing did not suit her. When a thing did suit her he merely nodded his head approvingly and his eyes twinkled a little.
    “Yes; I think you look less like a fourth-former in that! We’d better have it,” he would instruct the saleswoman.
    The evening frock was supplied by a woman who called herself Delphine, and whose little salon was done out in mauve and grey. She had had it on her hands for a few weeks, for it had been created for the young daughter of a customer, and then the order had been cancelled. It was a full-skirted creation in stiff ivory taffeta with tiny, ruched sleeves and