"I do hope as I don't intrude," said Mrs. Wright, passing her handkerchief over her shining forehead. "I didn't mean to take the liberty of calling, Mrs. Bolton, but your husband met my Tom the other day, and something he let fall made me think p'raps you'd be finding it a bit lonely; so I thought I'd come up on the chance."
"It was very kind of you," Maud said.
She sat with her visitor in the little dark front room in which Jake kept his business books, his whips, and all the paraphernalia of his calling. It was a bare, office-like apartment, and reeked horribly of Jake's tobacco; but Bunny was lying in the parlour and he had strenuously set his face against admitting the worthy Mrs. Wright there.
It was extremely cold, and Maud felt pinched and inhospitable. The grate was full of shavings, the whole place was cheerless and forlorn. It was a room that she scarcely ever entered, regarding it in fact more as Jake's office than an alternative sitting-room.
Mrs. Wright, however, stout, red, comfortable, did not feel the cold. She sat with her umbrella propped against her chair and regarded her stiff young hostess with much geniality on her homely face.
"You do look like a princess in a cottage, my dear, if you'll allow me to say so," she said. "And how are you getting on? I hope Jake's a good husband to you. I feel sure he would be. He's such an honest fellow. I often says to Tom, 'Give me a plain honest man like Jake Bolton,' I says; 'he's a man in a thousand.' I'm sure you think so yourself, Mrs. Bolton."
Maud, not knowing quite what to say, replied with reserve that she had no doubt he was. She was wondering if she could possibly offer Mrs. Wright tea in that dreadful little room of Jake's and if she would ever get rid of her if she didn't.
Mrs. Wright, serenely unconscious of the troublous question vexing her soul, went comfortably on. "I've often thought that if it had pleased the Almighty to send me a daughter, Jake's just the man I would have chosen for her. I like them eyes of his. They're so straight. But mind you, I think he has a temper of his own. Mayhap you've never met with it yet?"
She looked at Maud slyly out of merry little slits of eyes, and chuckled at the flush that rose in the girl's face.
"He certainly never loses it in my presence," Maud said stiffly.