Seeing that the train didn’t stop till it got there, the lady couldn’t say anything but yes; and then Mr. Pinner asked her if she would mind keeping an eye on his daughter, who, though a married lady too—the lady made a little bow of acknowledgement of this tribute to her evidently settled-down appearance, though she was, in fact, a spinster—yet didn’t know her way about very well.
Then when the train began to move, and Sally’s face, as she leant out of the window to say goodbye, was a study in despair, Mr. Pinner relented enough to pat her tear-stained cheek, and running a few steps beside the carriage bade her not take on any more.
‘What’s done’s done,’ he called out after the train, by way of cheering her.
And Sally, dropping back into her corner, pulled out her handkerchief and wept.
§
Yes. What was done was done true enough, she thought, mopping the tears as they rolled down her face, including her having married Mr. Luke and his mother; for she now regarded him and his mother as all of a piece.
The lady at the other end of the carriage, who, however hard she tried, couldn’t take her eyes off her—and she did try very hard, for she hated staring at grief—ventured after a while to repeat Mr. Pinner’s advice, and suggested, though in more Luke-like language, that Sally shouldn’t take on. Whereupon Sally, the voice being sympathetic and the face kind, took on more than ever.
‘Oh, please don’t,’ said the lady, much concerned, moving up to the seat opposite her. Such liquefaction she had never seen, nor such loveliness in spite of it. When she herself cried, which was very rarely—what was the good?—she became a swollen thing of lumps. ‘You mustn’t, really,’ she begged. ‘Your eyes—you simply mustn’t do anything to hurt them. What is it? Can I help at all? I’d love to if I could——’
By the time they were rushing through Bishops Stortford Sally had told her everything. Incoherent and sobbing at first, there was something about this lady that comforted her into calmness. She wasn’t at all like Mr. Thorpe, yet she took his sort of view, not Mr. Pinner’s, and was even more sympathetic, and even more understanding. It really seemed, from the questions she asked, as if she must know the Lukes personally. She said she didn’t, when Sally inquired if this were so, and laughed. She was very cheerful, and laughed several times, though she was so kind and sorry about everything.
‘You can’t go back there today, anyhow,’ she said at last. ‘Not into the middle of that party——’ she laughed and shuddered, for Sally had explained with a face of horror that nobody at all was going to be at the party who wasn’t either a lady or a gentleman except herself. ‘You shall come and stay with me for a few days till your Mr. Luke goes to Cambridge, and then we’ll see what happens. But I’m not going to let you go back into the clutches of that Mrs. Luke.’