The letter was less of a blow to Mrs. Walbridge than might have been expected, for, when faced with absolute ruin, an unexpected five hundred pounds comes very nearly like manna from heaven. Her relief when she had cashed the cheque and actually had the notes folded away in her shabby little old bag was so great that she had to struggle to keep the tears from her habitually tearless eyes. She did not go straight home from the bank, and restraining herself with a violent effort from rushing in to thank Mr. Lubbock and Mr. Payne—a course which she knew would be extremely distressing to them both—she did an unjustifiable but very forgivable thing. She went to Peter Robinson's and spent twenty-seven pounds nineteen and sixpence on a muff and stole for Griselda. This she had sent straight to her daughter, and, sitting at the counter in the shop, she wrote a little letter on a bit of paper out of one of her notebooks.
"My darling," she said, in her beautiful, clear writing, "here's a little present for you. I can't bear you to accept things from anyone but me. Explain to Elsie Ford, and I'm sure she'll understand your asking her to take back the beautiful furs she so kindly wanted to give you.
"When are you coming back? I don't want to cut your pleasure short, but you've been away for a long time now, and I miss you. Oliver came to see me yesterday, and he has a box for 'Roxana,' and wants you and me and a friend of his, a young man, to go with him on Thursday. Guy will be coming back any day now, and Christmas is near—and in fact I want my baby very badly.
"Your loving mother,
"Violet Walbridge."
This note she pinned on the muff, and herself folded the soft paper over it as it lay in the box. The girl who had sold it to her was very sympathetic and pleasant, and promised that it should go off that very day. When these things were accomplished, Mrs. Walbridge went on to Campden Hill, where she was lunching with Hermione.
Hilltop Road, Campden Hill, is a blind alley, beautifully quiet, with grass growing between the cobble-stones that pave it. It is a quiet, sunny, tree-sheltered place, with five or six engardened houses on either side, the smallest of which belonged to the Gaskell-Walkers. Even now, in November, a few scraggy roses and some brown-edged hydrangeas still garnished the sodden garden, and Mrs. Walbridge noticed with pleasure, as she went up the path, that the painters were evidently out. The door and windows glittered steadily in the glory of new bottle-green paint, and the windows themselves had lost the hollow-eyed look incidental to houses where the housemaids are not yet settled down to a religious respect for their blinds.
She was a little late for lunch, but Maud was the only other guest, and, as Maud was very hungry, they had not waited for her, and she found them sitting cosily over curried eggs in the pretty dining-room. She had not seen Maud for about a fortnight, and was pleased to find her looking well and rosy. Hilary was at the seaside with his Grannie Twiss, and Maud and Moreton, she was told, had been having a high old time doing the theatres.
"We are praying," the young wife added pleasantly, "for bubonic plague, or cholera, or something. Poor Moreton's only had three patients since we got back, and one of them only had neuralgia from his tooth, and Moreton had to send him across the passage to Mr. Burton to pull out a few. That," she added, reaching for the salt, "was rather bitter."
Hermione, looking radiantly pretty in her smart trousseau coat and skirt, was full of simple news about her husband and her house and their plans.
"Billy's not forgotten his promise about the Brat," she said, after a while. "He's asked Mr. Browning, his partner, you know, and he says he thinks they could make some kind of a place for him—for Guy, I mean."