“Can we see Mrs. Stark?” asked June.
“Eh?” said the janitor. He must have been deaf indeed not to have heard the question in its cool clarity. June repeated it; whereon the keeper of the door looked her slowly up and down, turning over the name in his mind as he did so.
“Mother Stark she was called,” said June, for his further enlightenment. “She sold all kinds of old rubbish at a shop that used to be opposite Middleton’s Dairy at the top of Love Lane.”
“Mother Stark you say!” Light was coming to the janitor. “No, you can’t see her.”
“Why not? The matter’s important.”
“She’s been in her grave this two month—that’s why not,” said the janitor.
“Oh,” said June; and then after brief commerce with the eye of William: “Has she any relations or friends?”
The answer was no. Mother Stark had had a parish burial.
William thanked Diogenes with that courtesy which was never-failing and inimitable; and then after one more swift glance at each other, they turned away, feeling somehow, a little overcome, yet upheld by the knowledge of being through at last with the matter of the poor old thing’s annuity.
Returning in their tracks across the canal footbridge, across the recreation ground, up the lane, past the site of the new picture house, past Middleton’s Dairy, they entered the High Street, without haste, in spite of Mr. Mitchell, and with a gravity new and strange, as if they both felt now the hand of destiny upon them.