“I don’t suppose he took a quarter what he used to take, but it made him drunk. ‘Twas but a minute of madness. You’ve saved him right enough.”
“I was not blaming him. I understand—I understand.”
He looked at her clearly. She was healthy and fine-looking, with large, eloquent eyes. Her dress was severe and quiet, as became her occupation—a plain, dark grey, but the shapely fulness of the figure gave softness to the outlines. It was no wonder Jasper Kimber wished to marry her; and, if he did, the future of the man was sure. She had a temperament which might have made her an adventuress—or an opera-singer. She had been touched in time, and she had never looked back.
“You are with Lady Eglington now, I have heard?” he asked.
She nodded.
“It was hard for you in London at first?”
She met his look steadily. “It was easy in a way. I could see round me what was the right thing to do. Oh, that was what was so awful in the old life over there at Heddington,”—she pointed beyond the hill, “we didn’t know what was good and what was bad. The poor people in big working-places like Heddington ain’t much better than heathens, leastways as to most things that matter. They haven’t got a sensible religion, not one that gets down into what they do. The parson doesn’t reach them—he talks about church and the sacraments, and they don’t get at what good it’s going to do them. And the chapel preachers ain’t much better. They talk and sing and pray, when what the people want is light, and hot water, and soap, and being shown how to live, and how to bring up children healthy and strong, and decent-cooked food. I’d have food-hospitals if I could, and I’d give the children in the schools one good meal a day. I’m sure the children of the poor go wrong and bad more through the way they live than anything. If only they was taught right—not as though they was paupers! Give me enough nurses of the right sort, and enough good, plain cooks, and meat three times a week, and milk and bread and rice and porridge every day, and I’d make a new place of any town in England in a year. I’d—”
She stopped all at once, however, and flushing, said: “I didn’t stop to think I was talking to you, sir.”
“I am glad you speak to me so,” he answered gently. “You and I are both reformers at heart.”
“Me? I’ve done nothing, sir, not any good to anybody or anything.”