Prudence, congratulating herself therefore on having acted so well, slipped upstairs and arrayed herself in a black hat, a thick veil, and a long cloak. Augusta she tucked up warmly in an old shawl, gave her her feeding bottle, and, having hidden her under the voluminous folds of the mantle, peeped cautiously out to make sure the coast was clear. Not a soul was in sight, so Prudence, with as guilty an air as if she were carrying off Mrs. Wilcox’s silver, crept downstairs, opened the front door, and closed it softly behind her.
She scarcely breathed until she was clear of Beaconsfield Gardens, and so closely did she keep Augusta pressed to her bosom, that when she perceived what she was doing a spasm of terror shot through her.
“How quiet she is,” she thought. “Perhaps I have smothered her.”
A glance reassured her, and she sped onwards. Suddenly her knees seemed to give way. Advancing towards her, but as yet unconscious of her presence, was old Major Jones, who had just stepped out of a tobacconist’s shop, and was smoking a postprandial cigar. Prudence darted across the road, turned down a side street, and terrified of meeting someone else who knew her, ran all the way to South Kensington Station.
There was no one in the first-class ladies’ waiting-room at London Bridge Station when Prudence arrived with her charge, except an elderly person on guard in a battered black bonnet and a woollen crochet shoulder shawl. It wanted twenty minutes of the time fixed by Mrs. Brown for the meeting, so Prudence, feeling really weak and ill from excitement and lack of food, that for two days she had been unable to taste, gave the female sixpence to hold Augusta, while she partook of a cup of tea in the refreshment room.
As she returned, piercing yells were audible long before she reached the waiting-room, and hastily entering she found her sister purple in the face, and bent backwards like a bow in the arms of the attendant.
Her nurse was jogging her roughly up and down, regarding her the while with an eye of dissatisfaction, not to say of dislike.
“I’m glad you’ve come back, ma’am,” she said, rising hastily as Prudence entered, and holding out her charge at arm’s length. “This baby o’ yours is the very crossest child I ever did see. I thought at first there was a pin in her clothes may be—it’s a little girl, ain’t it?—but I looked, and there’s never a one to be found, so it’s temper, so it is—and if I was you, ma’am, meaning no offence, I’d spank her well, young as she is, to take the mischief out of her. You can’t begin too soon with that sort. Just look what she’s done to my face!”
There certainly was a scratch on the old woman’s nose.
Prudence took her sister in silence, and tried to soothe her. Augusta, she knew, was fastidious, and probably disliked being held by the snuffy old caretaker, yet she could not help considering that under the circumstances the infliction might have been borne. Still, the baby continued to yell so that the people looked in to see what was the matter. She made prolonged efforts to disengage one leg from her lengthy and cumbersome draperies, till attracted by the frequency of the movement, Prudence examined her more closely. As she turned up the robe, Augusta stopped crying. There on her red-mottled limb was a nasty blue mark, where the irritated caretaker had given her a pinch.