Only women of exemplary moral character could expect to earn a certificate, the maid was careful to say. So much for hard and fast rules, Maggie thought, remembering the scandalous stories Tansy had told her about “her Rory at Government House.” A wry grin twisted her mouth as she gave Tansy a sidelong glance.

Tansy saw the look and promptly put out her tongue.

The maid’s discourse went on endlessly, covering rules of dress, deportment, language, and personal industry. Just when Maggie was beginning to feel sleepy, Lady Cosgrove swept imperiously into the room and took over.

She announced that she would personally interview each girl in turn, beginning with Miss Maggie Chamberlin.

Maggie was at once relieved and alarmed. An expedient conclusion to the required interview might allow her to make her way to Mr. McKenna’s offices before he forgot that she existed, but there was a certain distress in being singled out as the first too. Perhaps Lady Cosgrove saw through her pretense. No doubt, the worldly-wise woman had already guessed that Maggie Chamberlin was a fraud, having no intention of serving as a domestic if she could possibly avoid it.

Maggie rose from her seat at the trestle table with an air of confidence that was almost wholly feigned and followed Lady Cosgrove from the crowded, cozy kitchen, across the rear garden, and into the once-grand house.

Her ladyship kept an office in a cubicle adjoining the drawing room, a place cluttered with books and papers and old-fashioned quill pens. The only neatness in evidence came from the lady herself; she was immaculately groomed in every detail.

Lady Cosgrove invited Maggie to take a chair facing the messy French Provincial desk, and she had to shoo an enormous tabby cat off the seat in order to comply.

“Have you ever worked as a domestic servant, my dear girl?” Lady Cosgrove asked forthrightly. So forthrightly, in fact, that Maggie was caught completely off guard.

“Well, no,” she confessed lamely, without thinking first.

The next question was as gently candid as the first one had been. “How, then, did you support yourself?”

Maggie swallowed hard. “I was an actress, ma’am. In London.”

“And how did an American lass find herself in London?”

Quietly, honestly, Maggie explained how she had come to Europe with her parents because they’d been performing with a circus there, and how they’d died so tragically in a train crash.

“Dear me,” Lady Cosgrove said with sympathy, “it must have been a frightening situation to find oneself alone in a strange country, without friends.”

Not unlike the straits I’m in now, Maggie thought to herself, but she only nodded, conscious of a slight flush in her cheeks.

“You strike me as a most intelligent and well-mannered young woman,” observed the elderly lady. “Tell me, can you read and write and figure?”

“Yes,” Maggie responded somewhat briskly, surprised by the question.