“Oh!” she interrupted, with a note of sharp relief in her voice, and turned an embarrassed face in the direction of a solitary pedestrian, who appeared opportunely round a bend in the road, and slowly advanced, bearing a bundle in her arms, which at first the girl failed to recognise for an infant, wrapped in an old shawl. “There’s some one I want to speak to,” she said, and blessed Bessie Clapp for her timely appearance—“some one I know.”
“I’ll wait,” he said, still resolute though considerably ruffled at the interruption.
Prudence regarded him frowningly.
“No,” she insisted, “you mustn’t wait. I want to see her alone. I shall walk back with her.”
“That isn’t altogether kind,” he said—“to dismiss me. But I may see you another time?”
He held out his hand and waited. If he expected a direct answer to his tentative suggestion, he was disappointed. Prudence shook hands hurriedly, murmured a breathless good-bye, and left him to mount his cycle and ride in unclerical mood to his neglected meeting, where he accounted for his unpunctuality by confessing to a puncture which he omitted to explain was caused by a thorn which he had painstakingly placed in the road and ridden over when a quarter of a mile from the town. Which proves what an amount of trouble a conscientious person will take in the insincere evasion of a direct lie.
Prudence meanwhile advanced to meet the girl in the road. As the distance between them decreased she discovered that what the other carried in her arms was not an inanimate bundle, as she had supposed, but a little child. Instantly her interest quickened. The unexpected appearance of Bessie Clapp had seemed to her merely opportune at a moment when any diversion would have been welcome, but the sight of Bessie with a baby in her arms—presumably her own baby—caught her attention away from her immediate concerns and brought the other’s affairs into greater prominence. She had always believed that this girl had been hardly dealt by, and no one had ever considered it worth while to enlighten her. Prudence’s sense of justice was in arms, and her liking for Bessie, whom she had known from childhood, awoke anew at sight of the beautiful tragic face with its look of passionate antagonism. She halted in the girl’s path and accosted her with disarming friendliness.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” she said. “I thought you had left this neighbourhood altogether.”
“There are some as would like to make me leave,” said Bessie Clapp, her dark unsmiling gaze on the fair tranquillity of the younger, happier face. “I’ve been badgered enough. We’m living in the little village down over the hill.”
“Just five miles away! And I never knew.” Prudence bent suddenly over the bundle in her arms. “Is this your child?” she asked.