Again Helen was startled. It was when the hardness wore off the woman's face that the forgotten expression came back again. She had surely seen it before, and the softened tone seemed familiar. Could she trace it back through the years to the days of her childhood? It could not be black-eyed Susan, who pinched her when she cried, and threatened to pinch harder if she told? This woman's eyes were grey. Nor red-headed Molly, who in her afternoon walk invariably left her with her mother to be stuffed with black toffy, while she went off to gossip with the barber's son? Her hair was too black ever to have been red. Nor the maid who frightened her with ghost stories. Nor the namby-pamby one who cuddled her with kisses and called her beatific names, until in childish indignation she wrathfully rebelled.
All these in rapid movement of memory were set aside, but the more she thought, the more convinced she became that in the big medley of domestic servitors of the long past, this woman somewhere played her part. But the cobwebs were lifting. She would find her soon.
"You have not always lived on the lakes, Mrs. Latimer?" she asked at last.
"I never did till I married Latimer."
"And before that?" said Helen.
"I was from New York; but that's ten year ago, and Latimer was a British subject."
"And did you never cross the ocean? One would think that, living so much on the water, you would be sure to go over the sea."
"So I have, mum, so I have. I went over twenty year ago come June as servant to a New York lady and stayed there for a year, but I didn't like it, so I come home agin."
"Twenty years ago. And did you live for some time in South London, near the Thames?"
"Yes I did," answered the woman, with a start.