[CHAPTER X]
At half-past seven on the morning of Armistice Day Caroline Breeze, who was an early waker, but a late riser, was sitting up in bed reading. Her small, high up flat was very comfortable, and the good old woman had only to cross the room to light her gas-ring and prepare her morning tea. This she had done half an hour before, and was now propped up against many pillows with a pleasantly furnished tea-tray on her lap, bread and butter in one hand, which she dipped shamelessly into her tea, as she read, with avid, dreamy eyes, a new novel.
Miss Breeze was about sixty, and of irredeemable plainness, being the victim of that cruel form of indigestion that makes the nose red and the eyes watery. Her sparse grey hair, the front part of which was by day covered by a front of grey glossiness with but few pretences at concealment, that now hung, carefully brushed, on the foot of her bed like a bloodless and innocently come by war trophy, was screwed up on top of her big square head. She wore a little flannel jacket of the wrong shade of pink; her eiderdown, her window curtains, her wallpaper were pink, all too, of that pathetically wrong shade, but being comfortably colour blind, or taste blind, she knew nothing of this, and regarded her room as a bower of beauty and charm. The book she was reading was intensely interesting; there was in it a most cruelly treated companion, a revolting lap-dog that had to be taken for walks in the park, and a handsome nephew who ground his teeth in moments of emotion, and had designs on Rosamund (that was the governess's name). So engrossed was the good lady that presently she allowed her bit of bread and butter to soak too long in the tea, and as she raised it to her mouth it disintegrated, and fell with a horrid splash on her jacket.
"Oh, dear, how disgusting!" the old lady said aloud, laying down her book and removing the tea-soaked and buttery bread with a knife. "I do hope it's going to end all right."
When she had rubbed the front of her jacket vigorously with her napkin, she took up the book, and with a furtive air turned to the last page. This habit of looking at the end before she got to it was one of which Miss Breeze was very ashamed, but she was so tender-hearted that when she saw in the story any signs of possible tragedy, she really could not resist taking a hasty glance at the ending, just to see if things were all right. If they were she went back to the tale with undisturbed zest, and undiminished excitement over the intervening troubles of the heroine. But if the author had been so foolish as to allow death or misunderstanding to blight the life of her heroine, Caroline Breeze closed the book and never opened it again.
She had just resumed her reading, when a ring came at her door. The postman did not ring, and she did not receive telegrams, so she was startled, and sat staring owl-like through her glasses towards the door. The ring was repeated, followed by a quick tapping of ungloved fingers on the panel, and she heard a voice:
"Let me in, Caroline, it's only me."
"Good gracious. It's Violet!"