Edna placed her white arms upon the table and leant a little forward, her handsome face full of the absorption that is the expression common to most faces, handsome or otherwise, of which the owner is talking freely about him or herself.
"For the last week or two I have been having a poor woman out from Culmouth in here to do some sewing, because Miss Brown is ill. I went in to talk to her for a minute or two, the first day she came. I hate them to feel as though they weren't of the same flesh and blood as oneself—and I was struck by the sort of hard dreariness in her face, as though she had never known the meaning of love or gladness. I asked no questions, of course, but just laid my hand on her shoulder and said quietly, 'I don't know if you've ever read Browning—perhaps not—but there is a line of his that I want you to think about while you're mending those curtains: "God's in His Heaven—all's right with the world!"' And then I left her.
"Well, she didn't make very much response, poor thing, but every time I saw her when she came here I've just, in my own thoughts, thrown a little Cloak of Love round her. It seemed to me all that I could do. And this morning—after all these weeks, when one just went quietly on without any visible sign of success—this morning, Julian, when I came into the sewing-room—she looked up and smiled."
Julian looked as though this consummation struck him as being in the nature of an anti-climax.
"Day after day, I'd thrown my little Cloak of Love round her—and she'd come to feel the warmth of it at last. It has made me very happy, Julian. You will smile at me, very likely, but the winning of that poor little seamstress to a brighter, truer outlook seems to me—well, just extraordinarily worth while."
There was silence, while Lady Rossiter's softened expression denoted that she was devoting her reflections to the recent conquest. But presently she went back to her original ground of departure.
"About Mark, though—I care for him too much to see him take any risks. And I find—would to God I hadn't!—that my original instinct was correct."
Lady Rossiter waited, but her husband showed no disposition to ask for elucidation, and she was obliged to go on unquestioned.
"It was this very girl—Pauline Marchrose—who threw over Clarence Isbister because of his accident."
For once, Sir Julian displayed astonishment in the right place.