"This" was a five-pound note. When she was alone again Mary picked it up, and smoothed it out, and quivered at the crackle. These heavenly people! their tenderness, their consideration! Oh, how beautiful it would be if they knew all about her and there were no reservations! She did wish she could have, revealed all to them—they had been so nice and kind.
She sought the landlady and paid her debt—the delight she felt in paying her debt!—and said that she would be giving up her room after the next night. She went forth to a little foreign restaurant in Gray's Inn Road, where she dined wholesomely and well, treating herself to cutlets, bread-crumbed and brown, and bordered with tomatoes, to pudding and gruyere, and a cup of black coffee, all for eighteenpence, after tipping the waiter. She returned to the attic—glorified attic! it would never appal her any more—and abandoned herself to meditating upon the "things." There was this, and there was that, and there was the other. Yes, and she must have a box! She would have had her initials painted on the box, only the paint would look so curiously new. Should she have her initials on it? No, she decided that she would not. Then there were her watch, and the bag to be redeemed at the pawnbroker's, and she must say good-bye to Mr. Collins. What a busy day would be the morrow! what a dawn of new hope, new peace, new life! Her anxieties were left behind; before her lay shelter and rest. Yet on a sudden the pleasure faded from her features, and her lips twitched painfully.
"Tony!" she murmured.
She stood still where she had risen. A sob, a second sob, a torrent of tears. She was on her knees beside the bed, gasping, shuddering, crying out on God and him:
"O Tony, Tony, Tony!"
CHAPTER VII
The sun shone bright when she met Mrs. Kincaid at Euston. The doctor was there, lounging loose-limbed and bony, by his mother's side. He shook Mary's hand and remarked that it was a nice day for travelling. She had been intending to say something grateful on greeting him, but his manner did not invite it, so she tried to throw her thanks into a look instead. She suffered at first from slight embarrassment, not knowing if she should take her own ticket, nor what assistance was expected of a companion at a railway-station. Perhaps she ought to select the compartment, and superintend the labelling of the luggage? Fortunately the luggage was not heavy, her own being by far the larger portion; and the tickets, she learnt directly, he had already got.
Her employer lived in Westport, a town that Mary had never visited, and a little conversation arose from her questions about it. She did not say much—she spoke very diffidently, in fact; the consciousness that she was being paid to talk and be entertaining weighted her tongue. She was relieved when, shortly after they started, Mrs. Kincaid imitated her son's example, who lay back in his corner with his face hidden behind The Lancet.
They travelled second class, and it was not till a stoppage occurred at some junction that their privacy was invaded. Then a large woman, oppressed by packages and baskets, entered; and, as the new-comer belonged to the category of persons who regard a railway journey as a heaven-sent opportunity to eat an extra meal, her feats with sandwiches had a fascination that rivalled the interest of the landscape.