CHAPTER XVI
ILLUMINATION
When the two men went out Miss Chatterton discovered that she had undertaken a very difficult task. The seamstress lay still looking at her, evidently expectant, but saying nothing. She, it appeared, felt herself mistress of the position. Lilian felt that the silence was growing painful, and determined to attack the subject boldly.
"Mr. Dane has clearly been a good friend to your brother, but may I ask whether that evening at the Hallows Bridge was the only time you spoke to him?"
A flush crept into the sick girl's cheeks, and a hardness into her eyes.
"I was expecting ye would ask me. What would ye say if I did not answer?"
"Probably nothing," returned Lilian, quietly. "Mr. Dane is, as we know, somewhat impulsive, as well as generous. Why do you tell me that you expected such a question?"
Mary Johnstone painfully raised herself on one elbow.
"Ye are a grand lady, but hard, I think, as some folk would call ye bonny. I am a poor sewing woman with the need to strive hard, an' always, to keep hunger from the door—but in the hearts of us there is no that difference between you an' me. No—bide ye and listen."
Lilian had risen, but she sat down again. Something in the girl's voice and manner compelled her attention, for the seamstress spoke as equal to equal on the basis of their common humanity.
"I owe ye little, Miss Chatterton. What ye paid, I earned, an' some of it hardly, but when ye bade me come no more to The Larches, with no other word, there was many an ill tongue to cast dirt at me, forby lying tales that ye found things of value missing."