"That's very kind of you."
Bowing slightly to Mrs. Wickham and nodding to her husband, he went out.
"We must go, too, Dorothy," said James uneasily.
Mrs. Wickham began drawing on her gloves. "Jim will be writing to you in a day or two. You know how grateful we both are for all you did for our poor aunt. We shall be glad to give you the very highest references. You're such a wonderful nurse. I'm sure you'll have no difficulty in getting another situation; I expect I can find you something myself. I'll ask among all my friends."
Nora made no reply to this affable speech.
"Come on, Dorothy; we really haven't any time to lose," said Wickham hurriedly.
"Good-by, Miss Marsh."
"Good-by," said Nora dully. She stood, her hands resting on the table, her eyes fastened on the long blue envelope which Mr. Wynne had forgotten. From a long way off she heard the wheels of the cab on the driveway.
CHAPTER IV
"I thought they were never going. Well?"
It was Miss Pringle who had come in from her retreat in the garden, eager to hear the news the moment she had seen the Wickhams driving away. Nora turned and looked at her without a word.
Miss Pringle was genuinely startled at the drawn look on her face.
"Nora! What's the matter? Isn't it as much as you thought?"
"Miss Wickham has left me nothing," said Nora in a dead voice.
Miss Pringle gave a positive wail of anguish. "Oh-h-h-h."
"Not a penny. Oh, it's cruel!" the girl said, almost wildly. "After all," she went on bitterly, "there was no need for her to leave me anything. She gave me board and lodging and thirty pounds a year. If I stayed it was because I chose. But she needn't have promised me anything. She needn't have prevented me from marrying."
"My dear, you could never have married that little assistant. He wasn't a gentleman," Miss Pringle reminded her.
"Ten years! The ten best years of a woman's life, when other girls are enjoying themselves. And what did I get for it? Board and lodging and thirty pounds a year. A cook does better than that."
"We can't expect to make as much money as a good cook," said Miss Pringle, with touching and unconscious pathos. "One has to pay something for living like a lady among people of one's own class."
"Oh, it's cruel!" Nora could only repeat.
"My dear," said Miss Pringle with an effort at consolation, "don't give way. I'm sure you'll have no difficulty in finding another situation. You wash lace beautifully and no one can arrange flowers like you."
Nora sank wearily into a chair. "And I was dreaming of France and Italy--I shall spend ten years more with an old lady, and then she'll die and I shall look out for another situation. It won't be so easy then because I shan't be so young. And so it'll go on until I can't find a situation because I'm too old, and then some charitable people will get me into a home. You like the life, don't you?"
"My dear, there are so few things a gentlewoman can do."
"When I think of those ten years," said Nora, pacing up and down the length of the room, "having to put up with every unreasonableness! Never being allowed to feel ill or tired. No servant would have stood what I have. The humiliation I've endured!"
"You're tired and out of sorts," said Miss Pringle soothingly. "Everyone isn't so trying as Miss Wickham. I'm sure Mrs. Hubbard has been kindness itself to me."
"Considering."
"I don't know what you mean by 'considering.'"
"Considering that she's rich and you're poor. She gives you her old clothes. She frequently doesn't ask you to have dinner by yourself when she's giving a party. She doesn't remind you that you're a dependent unless she's very much put out. But you--you've had thirty years of it. You've eaten the bitter bread of slavery till--till it tastes like plum cake!"
Miss Pringle was distinctly hurt. "I don't know why you say such things to me, Nora."
"Oh, you mustn't mind what I say; I----"
"Mr. Hornby would like to see you for a minute, Miss," said Kate from the doorway.
"Now?"
"I told him I didn't think it would be very convenient, Miss, but he says it's very important, and he won't detain you more than five minutes."
"What a nuisance. Ask him to come in."
"Very good, Miss."
"I wonder what on earth he can want."
"Who is he, Nora?"
"Oh, he's the son of Colonel Hornby. Don't you know, he lives at the top of Molyneux Park? His mother was a great friend of Miss Wickham's. He comes down here now and then for week-ends. He's got something to do with motor cars."
"Mr. Hornby," said Kate from the door.
Reginald Hornby was evidently one of those candid souls who are above simulating an emotion they do not feel. He had regarded the late Miss Wickham as an unusually tiresome old woman. His mother had liked her of course. But he could hardly have been expected to do so. Moreover, he had a shrewd notion that she must have been a perfect Tartar to live with. Miss Marsh might be busy or tired out with the ordeal of the day, but as she also might be leaving almost immediately and he wanted to see her, he had not hesitated to come, once he was sure that the Wickham relatives had departed. That he would find the late Miss Wickham's companion indulging in any show of grief for her late employer, had never entered his head.
He was a good-looking, if rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything about him--his tie, his handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, his boots--bore the stamp of the very latest thing.
"I say, I'm awfully sorry to blow in like this," he said airily.
He beamed on Nora, whom he had always regarded as much too pretty a girl to be what he secretly called a 'frozy companion' and sent a quick inquiring glance at Miss Pringle, whom he vaguely remembered to have seen somewhere in Tunbridge Wells. But then Tunbridge Wells was filled with frumps. Oh, yes. He remembered now. She was usually to be seen leading a pair of Poms on a leash.
"You see, I didn't know if you'd be staying on here," he went on, retaining Nora's hand, "and I wanted to catch you. I'm off in a day or two myself."
"Won't you sit down? Mr. Hornby--Miss Pringle."
"How d'you do?"
Mr. Hornby's glance skimmed lightly over Miss Pringle's surface and returned at once to Nora's more pleasing face.
"Everything go off O. K.?" he inquired genially.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Funeral, I mean. Mother went. Regular outing for her."
Miss Pringle stiffened visibly in her chair and began to study the pattern in the rug at her feet with an absorbed interest. Nora was conscious of a wild desire to laugh, but with a heroic effort succeeded in keeping her face straight out of deference to her elderly friend.
"Really?" she said, in a faint voice.
"Oh, yes," went on young Hornby with unabated cheerfulness. "You see, mother's getting on. I'm the child of her old age--Benjamin, don't you know. Benjamin and Sarah, you know," he explained, apparently for the benefit of Miss Pringle, as he pointedly turned to address this final remark to her.
"I understand perfectly," said Miss Pringle icily, "but it wasn't Sarah."
"Wasn't it? When one of her old friends dies," he went on to Nora, "mother always goes to the funeral and says to herself: 'Well, I've seen her out, anyhow!' Then she comes back and eats muffins for tea. She always eats muffins after she's been to a funeral."
"The maid said you wanted to see me about something in particular," Nora gently reminded him.
"That's right, I was forgetting."
He wheeled suddenly once more on Miss Pringle, who had arrived at that stage in her study of the rug when she was carefully tracing out the pattern with the point of her umbrella.
"If Sarah wasn't Benjamin's mother, whose mother was she?"
"If you want to know, I recommend you to read your Bible," retorted that lady with something approaching heat.