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Yes. What was done was done true enough, she thought, mopping the tears as they rolled down her face, including her having married Mr. Luke and his mother; for she now regarded him and his mother as all of a piece.
The lady at the other end of the carriage, who, however hard she tried, couldn’t take her eyes off her—and she did try very hard, for she hated staring at grief—ventured after a while to repeat Mr. Pinner’s advice, and suggested, though in more Luke-like language, that Sally shouldn’t take on. Whereupon Sally, the voice being sympathetic and the face kind, took on more than ever.
‘Oh, please don’t,’ said the lady, much concerned, moving up to the seat opposite her. Such liquefaction she had never seen, nor such loveliness in spite of it. When she herself cried, which was very rarely—what was the good?—she became a swollen thing of lumps. ‘You mustn’t, really,’ she begged. ‘Your eyes—you simply mustn’t do anything to hurt them. What is it? Can I help at all? I’d love to if I could——’
By the time they were rushing through Bishops Stortford Sally had told her everything. Incoherent and sobbing at first, there was something about this lady that comforted her into calmness. She wasn’t at all like Mr. Thorpe, yet she took his sort of view, not Mr. Pinner’s, and was even more sympathetic, and even more understanding. It really seemed, from the questions she asked, as if she must know the Lukes personally. She said she didn’t, when Sally inquired if this were so, and laughed. She was very cheerful, and laughed several times, though she was so kind and sorry about everything.
‘You can’t go back there today, anyhow,’ she said at last. ‘Not into the middle of that party——’ she laughed and shuddered, for Sally had explained with a face of horror that nobody at all was going to be at the party who wasn’t either a lady or a gentleman except herself. ‘You shall come and stay with me for a few days till your Mr. Luke goes to Cambridge, and then we’ll see what happens. But I’m not going to let you go back into the clutches of that Mrs. Luke.’
And she leant forward and took her hand, and smiled so kindly and cheerfully, and said, ‘You’ll come for a day or two to our house, won’t you? My father isn’t there just now, and I’ve got it all to myself. Come till we have made up our minds about what to do next.’
This really seemed too good to be true. Sally turned scarlet. Was she saved? Saved, at the very last minute, from horror and disgrace?
‘Just for a day or two,’ said her new friend, who couldn’t take her eyes off Sally’s face, ’till your husband can find somewhere for you to live. We’ll help him to look. I’ll come with you, and help to find something. No, it doesn’t matter a bit about your not having any luggage—I can lend you everything. And we’ll write to him if you like, and tell him you can’t and won’t stay with his mother. Don’t you think this is quite the best plan? Don’t you, Sally?’
And she smiled, and asked if she might call her Sally.
‘But,’ hesitated Sally, for she didn’t want to get anybody into difficulties, ‘Father says I’m a runaway wife, and ’e wouldn’t ’arbour me ’imself because of that.’
‘Oh, but somebody must. And I’m the very one for it, because I’m so respectable, and not a wife. Don’t you worry, you lovely thing. We really must bring your Mr. Luke to his senses. By the way, hasn’t he got a Christian name?’
‘You never ’eard such a name,’ said Sally earnestly, who felt, to her own great surprise, almost as comfortable and easy with this strange lady as she had with Mr. Soper. ‘Outlandish, I call it.’
Her new friend laughed again when she told her it was Jocelyn. ‘Aren’t you delicious,’ she said, her bright eyes screwed up with laughter.
Sally liked being called delicious. It gave her assurance. Jocelyn had called her lots of things like that in his red-eared moments, but they hadn’t done her much good, because they never seemed to go on into next day. This lady was quite in her ordinary senses, her ears were proper pale ears, and what she said sounded as though it would last. And how badly Sally needed reassurance after the things Mr. Pinner had said to her that morning!
‘Now you come along with me,’ said her friend, jumping up as the train ran into Liverpool Street, her eyes, which were like little black marbles, dancing. ‘And please call me Laura, will you? Because it’s my name.’
She leaned out of the window, and waved. A chauffeur came running down the platform and opened the door; a car was waiting; and in another minute Sally was in it, once more sunk in softness, and once more with a lovely fur rug over her knees, while sitting next to her, talking and laughing, was her new friend, and sitting opposite her, neither talking nor laughing, a smart young lady in black, carrying a bag, who had appeared from nowhere and wasn’t taken any notice of, and who looked steadily out of the window.
‘What a day I’m ’avin’, thought Sally.
But when presently the car stopped at a big house in a great square with trees in the middle, and a footman appeared at the door, and in the hall Sally could see another one just like him, and then another, and yet another, she was definitely frightened.
‘Oh lor,’ she whispered, shrinking back into the car.
‘No—Laura,’ said her new friend, laughing and taking her hand; and drawing it through her arm she led her up the steps of the house, and into the middle of the first real fleshpots of her life.