Edwin shook his head. “When?” he asked.
“Well, this morning,” said Mrs Hamps. “I met them as I was coming up. She was on one side of the road, and the child was on the other—just opposite Howson’s. My belief is she’d lost all control over the little jockey. Oh! A regular little jockey! You could see that at once. ‘Now, George, come along,’ she called to him. And then he shouted, ‘I want you to come on this side, auntie.’ Of course I couldn’t stop to see it out. She was so busy with him she only just moved to me.”
“George? George?” Maggie consulted her memory. “How old was he, about?”
“Seven or eight, I should say.”
“Well, it couldn’t be one of Tom’s children. Nor Alicia’s.”
“No,” said Auntie Hamps. “And I always understood that the eldest daughter’s—what’s her name?”
“Marian.”
“Marian’s were all girls.”
“I believe they are. Aren’t they, Edwin?”
“How can I tell?” said Edwin. It was a marvel to him how his auntie collected her information. Neither she nor Clara had ever been in the slightest degree familiar with the Orgreaves, and Maggie, so far as he knew, was not a gossiper. He thought he perceived, however, the explanation of Mrs Hamps’s visit. She had encountered in the street a phenomenon which would not harmonise with facts of her own knowledge, and the discrepancy had disturbed her to such an extent that she had been obliged to call in search of relief. There was that, and there was also her natural inclination to show herself off on her triumphant sixtieth birthday.