A little further on sat Miss Purley, at her window, ready to put up her great square, chased gold eye-glass, and stare at the blushing girl with all the indignant force of thirty-nine tinged yellow, against nineteen of the freshest pink.
Again a little further, and she came suddenly upon Eve Pelly, who came from the big house, started, stopped, caught her hands, ejaculating “Oh, Daisy!” and then breaking down, turned suddenly away and re-entered the house.
To her horror, poor Daisy found that this meeting had been witnessed by Miss Primgeon, the lawyer’s sister, who was seated at her window, staring as hard as she could.
Not twenty yards farther on there stood Tom Podmore, leaning against a corner of a lane, also watching her; but as she approached he turned away without a word.
It was almost unbearable, and now a feeling of anger began to rise in Daisy’s bosom, making her pant, and flush up, as she determined to go on at all hazards.
Jane Budger, who kept the little beerhouse, and knew all the gossip of the place, which she retailed with gills of ale to her customers, saw her, stared, or rather squinted at her, and moved her hands as she exclaimed:
“Yes, my dear, I know where you are agate for to-night.”
Then there seemed a peculiar meaning in the innocent remark of one neighbour who met her in the street, and observed that the stones were “strange and slape.” So it was with another a little higher up, who remarked that the road was “very clatty.”
Next she met Big Harry in the muddiest part of the main street, and he exclaimed to her:
“Saay, lass, it’s solid soft.”