"My dear Charlotte!"
"My dear Elizabeth, I mean it. And, what's more, I wouldn't care who he was. A pump? What earthly use is a pump? It must be Mumford's then, if it is a pump."
"It can't be."
"Why not?"
"For the simple reason that Mumford's is on the other side of the road."
"Then we are on the other side of the road, as I have been maintaining all along."
"Would you mind walking round it?... Yes, you are right. It is Mumford's pump, for I have just bruised my wrist against the handle. Can you find the trough?"
"The astonishing thing to me," announced Mrs. Pope, groping her way with trepidation, "is that nobody shows a light. I don't like to call people unfeeling; but really, with folks in distress out at sea, and the guns firing, I wouldn't have believed such callousness."
They made the circuit of Mumford's pump, and assured themselves—for what the knowledge was worth—that it really was a pump, and Mumford's. But this cost them dear, for at the end of the circuit, or rather of a circuit and a half, they had lost all sense of their compass bearings.
"And after all," Mrs. Pope began afresh, her mind working sympathetically in a circle, "I don't understand what Mumford's pump is doing on the wrong side of the road."