“Well, it’s rather inconvenient with all the washing-up to do, and as you know I make it a rule that boarders have to be in to their meals, or go without—still—”
“Please don’t trouble!” Joan said stiffly.
The woman looked up the stairs after the tall, slight figure.
“Very well, then, I won’t!” she muttered. “The airs some people give themselves! Anyone would think she was a lady, instead of a clerk or something.”
There was a letter addressed to Joan waiting for her in her room. She opened it, and read it.
“DEAR JOAN,
“I suppose you are in a temper with me, and I don’t think you have acted quite fairly. A man can’t do more than ask a girl to be his wife. It is not usually considered an insult; however, I say nothing, except just this: You won’t find it easy to get other work to do, and if you like to come back here on Monday morning, the same as usual, I think you will be doing the sensible thing.
“Yours,
“PHILIP SLOTMAN.”
She had never meant to go back. This morning she had thanked Heaven that she had looked her last on Mr. Philip Slotman, and yet a few hours can effect such changes.
The door was open to her; she could go back, and pick up her life again where she had dropped it before her journey to Cornbridge. After all, Slotman was not the only cad in the world. She would find others, it seemed to her, wherever she went.
At any rate, Slotman had opened the door by which she might re-enter. As he said, work would be very, very hard to get, and it was a bitter thing to have to starve.
“Perhaps,” she said to herself wearily as she lay down on her bed, “perhaps I shall go back. It does not seem to matter so very much after all what I do—and I thought it did.”