Mrs. Hanson always turned to the Bible for comfort and for advice in times of stress and doubt. She was reading stolidly through the story of Naboth's Vineyard and was deriving much spiritual comfort from it. Very stern and unrelenting she looked sitting primly bolt upright, her hands resting on the book and her spectacles adjusted on the end of her long and pointed nose.
Now and again out of the corner of her eye she glanced at the girl who was slowly putting the finishing touches to her work. In a little while the girl must be gone, Mrs. Hanson was a stern and unrelenting woman.
Where the girl would go to, Mrs. Hanson did not know, she never gave it a thought.
"She did say, she did hate me!" the old woman thought. "Hate—a perilous wicked thing for a young gell to say—and to abide in a house of hatred, I will not! There's the Bible for it—'Better a dinner of yarbs and contentment therewith than a stalled ox in the house——'" Mrs. Hanson looked up, a shadow had fallen across the window, there came a light tapping on the door.
"Bless me and bless my dear soul!" said Mrs. Hanson aloud, "if here b'ain't my Lady Homewood, Betty quick—quickly open the door to Her Ladyship, quick now! Do 'ee hear me speak?"
The door was opened by Betty. Coming from the hot bright sunlight of the outer world into the twilight of the little room, Kathleen could only see a slight, slender figure in an old cotton gown, which figure bobbed a deferential, yet it almost seemed a defiant little curtsey to her.
"This is Mrs. Hanson's cottage?" Kathleen asked.
"Yes, my lady!"
Mrs. Hanson had risen, she bobbed, it was no half hearted curtsey this of hers, she seemed to sink into the floor to her middle and then rose again, tall and lean and agitated.
"Mrs. Hanson I be, my Lady, and proud I be to see your Ladyship here—Betty, a chair for her Ladyship, my maid!"