"How fast you walk, my dear," observed Mrs. Smith with a smile; "you must remember that I'm not quite so young as you are. I'll get my husband to find out your brother and bring him to our meeting-place at the baker's; for, eager as you are, I suppose that you'll hardly rush right into the barracks to see him."
Miriam laughed—how merry and blithe was her laugh—and slackened her pace a little.
As they turned the corner of a street, Mrs. Smith spoke again, but in a lower tone, to her young companion.
"We had better cross over to the other side of the road; don't you see that soldier in front of us can't walk straight, I'm sure that the fellow is drunk."
Miriam did not appear to have heard what was said, and when Mrs. Smith put her hand upon the girl's arm to draw her across the road, to her surprise she felt that the arm was nervously trembling! Looking into Miriam's face, Mrs. Smith saw that she had suddenly turned very pale, and that her eyes were fixed with intense emotion upon the form of the soldier in front, though his back was turned towards them.
"Come, I say, he's in liquor," repeated Mrs. Smith in a whisper, "let's go to the other side of the way."
At that moment the soldier chanced to turn round: it had not been needful for Miriam to see that face—that flushed face: she had already recognised her darling brother in the half-intoxicated man whom her companion had been afraid to pass!
Hamil was not so far gone in drinking as not to recognise Miriam; the sudden meeting half-sobered him, and he gave her a loud, much too loud a greeting. But the red face, the thick utterance, the unsteady gait, the noisy mirth, all cut like a knife into the heart of poor Miriam. She had never thought, till that day, that she could be ashamed of her brother.
She would have given anything that Mrs. Smith had not seen him, that he had not turned round, but gone on his way. The words, "I'm sure that he's drunk," seemed to haunt her, ringing in her ears all the rest of the day, and breaking her rest at night, after she had returned from her miserable visit to Woolwich. Wretchedness made Miriam's naturally warm temper very irritable indeed on that evening.
Caroline wondered what could have come over her, and Mrs. Mellor determined that she would not soon again give her young servant an afternoon's leave.