For a moment or so she sat silent, thinking. She held her chin in her hand and pinched it. Presently she looked up.
“Could you come and live with me for a month?” she enquired. “I believe we might try the experiment. I daresay you would rub me when I want rubbing, and go errands and help me up and down stairs and carry things for me. It just happens that my old Jane has been obliged to leave me because she’s beginning to be as rheumatic as I am myself, and her daughter offers her a good home. Would you like to try? I don’t promise to do more than make the experiment.”
The girl flushed hot this time, as she looked down on the floor.
“You may guess whether I’m likely to say ‘yes’ or not,” she said. “I ain’t had a crust to-day. I believe I could learn to suit you. But I never expected anything as good as this to happen to me. Thank you, ma’am. May I—when must I come?”
“Take off your bonnet and go and have your dinner, and stay now,” answered Miss Amory.
When John Baird called later in the day, Miss Amory was walking in the sun in her garden and Susan was with her, supporting her stiff steps. She had been fed, her dress had been changed for a neat print, and the dragged lines of her face seemed already to have relaxed. She no longer wore the look of a creature who is hungry and does not know how long her hunger may last and how much worse it may become.
“I am much obliged to you, Miss Amory,” Baird said when he joined her, and he said it almost impetuously. To-day he was in the state of mind when even vicarious good deeds are a support and a consolation. To have been a means of doing a good turn even to this stray creature was a comfort.
Miss Amory removed her hand from Susan’s arm and allowed Baird to place it on his own. The girl went away in obedience to a gesture.
“She will do,” said Miss Amory, “and it is a home for her. She’s not stupid. If she fulfils the promise of her first day I may end by interesting myself in developing her brains. She has brains. The gray matter is there, but it has never moved much so far. It will be interesting to set it astir. But it was not that I thought of when I took her.”
“You took her out of the kindness of your heart,” said Baird.