“Well, my dear,” she exclaimed, “I’m glad to have seen you even for a moment, and I hope your business, whatever it be, will be successful. I want to tell you something, here and now, which I’ve never said to you yet, long as we’ve known one another!”
“Yes, Miss Forsyth?” Mrs. Otway looked up surprised—perhaps a little apprehensive as to what was coming.
“I want to tell you, Mary, that to my mind you belong to the very small number of people, of my acquaintance at any rate, who shall see God.”
Mrs. Otway was startled and touched by the other’s words, and yet, “I don’t quite know what you mean?” she faltered—and she really didn’t.
“Don’t you?” said Miss Forsyth drily. “Well, I think Mrs. Purlock, and a good many other unhappy women in Witanbury, could tell you.”
Late in the next afternoon, after leaving the little luggage she had brought with her at the old-fashioned lodgings where she found that Miss Forsyth had made careful arrangements for her comfort, even to ordering what she should have for dinner, Mrs. Otway made her way, on foot, into Piccadilly, and thence into quiet Arlington Street.
There it was very dark—too dark to see the numbers on the doors of the great houses which loomed up to her right.
Bewildered and oppressed, she touched a passer-by on the arm. “Could you tell me,” she said, “which is No. 20?” And he, with the curious inability of the average Londoner to tell the truth or to acknowledge ignorance in such a case, at once promptly answered, “Yes, miss. It’s that big house standing back here, in the courtyard.”
She walked through the gate nearest to her, and so up to a portico. Then, after waiting for a moment, she rang the bell.
The moments slipped by. She waited full five minutes, and then rang again. At last the door opened.