She stared so hard at the bonnet that her eyes grew misty, and the card with "much reduced" danced before her; but still she did not go into the shop. She stood like a statue for nearly five minutes, still staring at the bonnet; but she no longer saw it. What she saw was her own potato-patch last autumn; and in it, hard at work, was Ernie Comley, digging her potatoes for her because her lumbago was so bad.
"What do it matter for a hold image like me what I do wear?" she muttered. Then she turned from the window that held her heart's desire, and hurried down the market-place after Mrs. Comley and the rubsome Ernie.
She found them staring gloomily into the window of the ready-made clothes shop.
"You come in along o' me," she cried excitedly. "There's a suit in that window, 'This style eight and eleven three,' as 'll just do for Ernie, allowin' for growth. I'll buy it for un, an' you can pay me back a bit at a time, as is most convenient. Come on in."
The suit was bought, and presently Ernie, dirty, and as cheerful as he had been tearful a few minutes before, emerged from the doorway, hugging a large brown-paper parcel.
"I must do my shoppin' sharpish," Mrs. Birkin said as she came out of the shop, "or else Squoire 'll be back before I be ready. Good afternoon to you. No; don't you never name it. 'Tis no more than you'd 'a' done for me."
To herself she murmured as she hurried up the market-place, "I don't suppose as she'll ever pay I, she's but a slack piece; but I couldn't abear as that boy shouldn't 'ave none of the fun. We're none on us young but once."
Mrs. Birkin's Sunday bonnet was black, and although a black dress for best is not only permissible, but suitable, for an elderly cottager even at a wedding, to wear a black bonnet upon so festive an occasion is to commit a solecism of the most glaring kind.
Mrs. Birkin was a woman of much resource. Once the bonnet of her dreams had become an impossibility, owing to the expense of Ernie Comley's wedding garment, she set herself forthwith to manufacture another as like the one in the shop window at Ziren as her means would allow.
To that end she purchased a small, a very small, pot of cream enamel; red flowers, of a nondescript kind it is true, but still red, and plenty of them for the money; and three yards of pale lavender ribbon. She then picked all the trimming off her old bonnet, washed it, dried it in the oven with the door well ajar, lest the precious thing should "scarch." When dry, she enamelled it cream, inside and out, and when the enamel in its turn had dried, she trimmed the rejuvenated bonnet with the new flowers and ribbon. And a very imposing confection it looked, and quite unlike anything to be seen in any window of the Ziren shops. Mrs. Birkin herself felt certain misgivings about it; but she had done her best, and by her best she must abide.