Mrs. Brown looked at her keenly. “I’ll trust you, ma’am,” she said, “for I’m that soft-’earted, an’ I’ve took to the child. Pay me the twenty down, an’ send me thirty in Bank of England notes—none o’ yer cheques—within twenty-four hours, and I’ll take the little darling away.”
“Very well,” said Prudence relieved. “I will do as you say; but oh! Mrs. Brown, be sure you take every care of her, let her want for nothing;” and two big tears stood in the good-natured creature’s eyes.
“Madam,” answered Mrs. Brown, “it’s a lucky child as comes to me; and now will you please give me your name and address, and just write a promise to pay on this ’ere bit of paper, and hand me over the twenty pounds and I’ll give you a receipt; and give me the byby, for my train is about due, and you’ve got my name and address, and I expects to be notified whenever you’re a coming to see the byby, and I never allows as payments to be more than a week in arrears, or I brings back the child.”
Prudence was rather bewildered by Mrs. Brown’s last lengthy and rapid speech, “I never allows no payments to be more than a week in arrears.”
What could she mean by that? It really sounded as if she were familiar with transactions of the kind, but surely no respectable married woman, so nice in appearance too, even though her grammar was not faultless, would need more than one child to adopt; so, telling herself she had misunderstood, Prudence paid down the twenty pounds, kissed Augusta, saw Mrs. Brown and that infant into the train, and then relieved, yet with many cares on her mind, made her way back to Beaconsfield Gardens.
Meantime Mrs. Brown, who watched her standing on the platform until the train moved out of the station, began to feel she had made a bad bargain.
“I was a bloomin’ idiot not to arsk thirty bob,” she muttered, “an’ a ’undred down. She’s that soft she’d ’ave given it. There! stow it, you brat!” she added with sudden fury, turning to Augusta, who had set up a dismal wail.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE MEDICAL LADY BAFFLED.
No. 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, South Kensington, was in a ferment of excitement. Something had happened. The boarders did not quite know what, but there was in the air that electrical unrest that spreads so rapidly from one individual to another.
The mystery of Miss Semaphore’s illness was under discussion. What ailed her? She had eaten nothing for two days. Was she really better? Was she worse? Why this secrecy and embarrassment on the part of the usually garrulous and impulsive Prudence? Why was no doctor called in? Why, why, why, in a thousand forms, was the favourite interrogative pronoun on the lips of the ladies and gentlemen as they sat round the fire after dinner and discussed something more interesting to them than the Daily Telegraph, that oracle beloved of boarding-houses.