Come right over.
An hour later the manager of the Southampton branch of the White
Star Line was dazzled by an apparition, a beautiful girl who burst
in upon him with flushed face and shining eyes, demanding a berth on
the steamship _Atlantic_ and talking about a Lady Wetherby. Ten
minutes later, her passage secured, Claire was walking to the local
theatre to inform those in charge of the destinies of The Girl and
the Artist number one company that they must look elsewhere for a
substitute for Miss Claudia Winslow. Then she went back to her hotel
to write a letter home, notifying her mother of her plans.
She looked at her watch. It was six o'clock. Back in West
Kensington a rich smell of dinner would be floating through the
flat; the cook, watching the boiling cabbage, would be singing A
Few More Years Shall Roll; her mother would be sighing; and her
little brother Percy would be employed upon some juvenile
deviltry, the exact nature of which it was not possible to
conjecture, though one could be certain that it would be something
involving a deafening noise.
Claire smiled a happy smile.
4
The offices of Messrs Nichols, Nichols, Nichols, and Nichols were
in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The first Nichols had been dead since the
reign of King William the Fourth, the second since the jubilee
year of Queen Victoria.
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