When they neared the cottage she was limping wretchedly. He stopped suddenly and looked down at her little house shoes.
‘The heel has come off,’ she said dismayedly.
It was really a catastrophe, for they were to have gone two miles further, and then tried to get a conveyance of some sort.
‘Perhaps I could walk without them,’ she said, and slipped one off, ‘Oh, do come on.’
There was a light burning in the dining-room window of the cottage.
‘Couldn’t you go in and get a pair?’ he asked, but she shuddered and shook her head.
‘I am afraid,’ she said—‘of Peggie.’
‘Sit down here then,’ he said, and found her a seat on some piled wood by the roadside. ‘I will try to take the other heel off.’
[p 159]
]Dot smothered an exclamation.
Peggie herself was leaning over the little side gate fifty yards away, and the figure of the district butcher was discernible on the footpath.