ttle hands in
triumph.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

PIXIE SCORES A SUCCESS.

A butler came to the door, a solemn-looking butler, with a white tie and
immaculate black clothes, but he seemed rather stupid for his age, for
he asked twice over before he could grasp the fact that Pixie had called
in answer to the advertisement, and then stared fixedly at her all the
time he was escorting her to the room where the other lady applicants
were waiting their turns.

Pixie gasped as she looked round and saw ladies, ladies everywhere, on
the row of leather chairs ranged along by the wall, on the sofa, on the
two easy-lounges by the fireside,--old ladies, young ladies, middle-aged
ladies, elderly ladies, shabby and dressy, fat and thin, but all
distinctly past their first youth, and all most obviously French. They
gaped at the new-comer, even as the butler had done, and she bowed
graciously from side to side, and said, "Bon jour, mesdames!" in her
most Parisian manner, then squeezed herself into a little corner by the
window and listened entranced to the never-ending stream of
conversation.

A room full of Englishwomen would under the circumstances have preserved
a depressed and solemn silence, but these good ladies chattered like
magpies, with such shruggings of shoulders, such waving of hands, such
shrillness of emphasis, that Pixie felt as if she were once more
domiciled in the Avenue Gustave.

The lady in the plaid dress, who occupied the next chair, asked her with
frank curiosity to recount then how she found herself in such a
position, and, being assured that she was indeed applying for the
situation, prophesied that it would never march! She turned and
whispered loudly to her companion, "Behold her, the poor pigeon! One
sees well that she has the white heart!" But the companion was less
amiable, and enraged herself because there were already applicants
enough, and with each new-comer her own chance of success became less
assured.

At intervals of five or ten minutes the butler returned and marshalled
the next in order to the presence of the lady of the house, but, short
as were the interviews, it was a weary wait before it came to Pixie's
turn, and she wondered fearfully whether Bridgie had taken fright at her
absence, and was even now searching the streets in a panic of alarm.
The hands of the clock pointed to ten minutes to six before the butler
gave the longed-for signal, and she smiled at him in her most friendly