"Well," she murmured, "to-morrow morning, then. She can turn out the sitting-room, and clean the silver in the black box, and then she can go--before dinner. I don't see why I should give her her dinner. Nor her extra day's wages either."
"And what shall you do for a servant? Get a charwoman?"
"Charwoman? No! Maggie will manage." And then with a sudden flare of relished violence: "I always knew that girl was a mopsy slut. And what's more, if you ask me, she brought him into the house--and after eleven o'clock at night too!"
"All right!" Edwin muttered, to soothe the patient.
And Mrs. Hamps sadly smiled.
"It's such a relief to me," she breathed. "You don't know what a relief to me it is to put it in your hands."
Her eyelids dropped. She said no more. Having looked back for an instant in a supreme effort on behalf of the conventions upon which society was established, Auntie Hamps turned again exhausted towards the lifting veil of the unknown. And Edwin began to realise the significance of the scene that was ended.
III
"I say," Edwin began, when he had silently closed the door of the sitting-room. "Here's a lark, if you like!" And he gave a short laugh. It was under such language and such demeanour that he concealed his real emotion, which was partly solemn, partly pleasurable, and wholly buoyant.
Maggie looked up gloomily. With a bit of pencil held very close to the point in her heavy fingers, she was totting up the figures of household accounts in a penny red-covered cash-book.