a clever one--she is. I did a good day's work when I married her.

"You shave off that moustache of yours--it ain't an ornament," she says
to me, "and chance it. Don't get attempting the lingo. Keep to the
broken English, and put in a shrug or two. You can manage that all
right."

I followed her tip. Of course the manager saw through me, but I got in a
"Oui, monsieur" now and again, and they, being short handed at the time,
could not afford to be strict, I suppose. Anyhow I got took on, and
there I stopped for the whole season, and that was the making of me.

Well, as I was saying, in she comes to the supper rooms, and toffy enough
she looked in her diamonds and furs, and as for haughtiness there wasn't
a born Marchioness she couldn't have given points to. She comes straight
up to my table and sits down. Her husband was with her, but he didn't
seem to have much to say, except to repeat her orders. Of course I
looked as if I'd never set eyes on her before in all my life, though all
the time she was a-pecking at the mayonnaise and a-sipping at the
Giessler, I was thinking of the coffee-shop and of the ninepenny haddick
and the pint of cocoa.

"Go and fetch my cloak," she says to him after a while. "I am cold."

And up he gets and goes out.

She never moved her head, and spoke as though she was merely giving me
some order, and I stands behind her chair, respectful like, and answers
according to the same tip,

"Ever hear from 'Kipper'?" she says to me.

"I have had one or two letters from him, your ladyship," I answers.

"Oh, stow that," she says. "I am sick of 'your ladyship.' Talk English;
I don't hear much of it. How's he getting on?"

"Seems to be doing himself well," I says. "He's started an hotel, and is
regular raking it in, he tells me."

"Wish I was behind the bar with him!" says she.

"Why, don't it work then?" I asks.

"It's just like a funeral with the corpse left out," says she. "Serves
me jolly well right for being a fool!"

The Marquis, he comes back with her cloak at that moment, and I says:
"Certainement, madame," and gets clear.

I often used to see her there, and when a chance occurred she would talk
to me. It seemed to be a relief to her to use her own tongue, but it
made me nervous at times for fear someone would hear her.

Then one day I got a letter from "Kipper" to say he was over for a
holiday and was stopping at Morley's, and asking me to look him up.

He had no