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"Cabman, are you asleep there? Bring the lady's bag this moment." As the cab disappeared without my even knowing where to find that good protector again in this vast maze of millions, I could not help letting a little cold fear encroach on the warmth of my outburst. "You are not sure of me, Miss Erema," said Mrs. Strouss, without taking offense.
Strouss himself, having heard of none of these things yet, I felt that my nurse might not have done her best, yet might have done worse, when she married him. For he seemed to have taken a liking toward me, and an interest in my affairs, which redounded to his credit, if he would not be too inquisitive.
But she walked away, in her stout, firm manner, and presently returned with Mr. Strouss, who seemed to be quite contented, and made me a bow with a very placid smile. "He is harmless; his ideas are most grand and good," his wife explained to me, with a nod at him. "But I could not have you in with the gentleman, Hans.
Strouss had forsaken a large and good company of lodgers, with only Herr Strouss to look after them and who was he among them? If she trod on one side of her foot, or felt a tingling in her hand, or a buzzing in her ear, she knew in a moment what it was of pounds and pounds was she being cheated, a hundred miles off, by foreigners!
"As if she was a-going to a ball, poor dear!" Betsy Strouss replied, with some irony. "A young lady full of high spirits by nature, and have never had her first dance yet! The laws and institutions of this kingdom is too bad for me, General. I shall turn foreigner, like my poor husband."
Strouss began again, without replying to my grateful glance; "Miss Erema, it is so sad that I wish I had never begun with it. But I see by your eyes so like your father's, but softer, my dear, and less troublesome that you will have the whole of it out, as he would with me once when I told him a story for the sake of another servant.
"Then the loss is on their side," I answered, with a smile; and he said, "Yes, yes, they lose vere much by me." Now I scarcely know whether it would be more clear to put into narrative what I heard from Betsy Bowen, now Wilhelmina Strouss, or to let her tell the whole in her own words, exactly as she herself told it then to me.
"Then he shall come out," said Mrs. Strouss, looking at me very pleasantly. "That was just like your father, Miss Erema. But I fall into the foreign ways, being so much with the foreigners." Whether she thought it the custom among "foreigners" for wives to lock their husbands in back kitchens was more than she ever took the trouble to explain.
"Why do you call me 'Miss Castlewood' so? You quite make me doubt my own right to the name." Major Hockin looked at me with surprise, which gladdened even more than it shamed me. Clearly his knowledge of all, as he described it, did not comprise the disgrace which I feared. "You are almost like Mrs. Strouss to-day," he answered, with some compassion. "What way is the wind?
Strouss replied, as she wiped her eyes to speak of things; "but the most wonderfulest of all things, don't you think, is the going of the time, Sir? No cabby can make it go faster while he waits, or slower while he is a-driving, than the minds inside of us manage it.
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