“I won’t say much,” she exclaimed. “But I should like you to know that I do understand what you are feeling, what you are going through, and I’ll do everything in my power to help you. You know I’m engaged all day. I’m so glad to-day happened to be a Saturday. But for that I shouldn’t have got your telegram until after you’d arrived in London!”
And then she drew Jean toward the bright little fire.
“It isn’t a bad place,” she said critically, “once one’s up here. The rest of the house is filthy.”
She took Jean’s hold-all. “Is this all you’ve brought?”
“Yes,” said Jean, and there crept a tone of defiance into her voice. “I think I may as well tell you at once why I’ve come to London. I’m going to take a place on Monday as general servant in a house where some one lives who, I believe might help, if she chose to do so, to prove Harry’s innocence.”
“I see,” said Rachel North slowly, “a bit of detective work? Knowing how sensible you used to be, I suppose that you’re acting under advice, eh?”
“Not altogether—but yes, I think I may say I’m acting under advice. Perhaps I ought to go out now and get clothes of the kind needed for that sort of work?”
There came a troubled look into her face, and the older girl felt touched, even a little amused.
“Don’t you worry about clothes,” she exclaimed. “I came very low down in the world at one time, and I’ve kept the things I wore then. They’re awfully shabby, but they’re quite clean. I don’t quite know why I kept them—it was a sort of superstitious feeling. I felt that if I gave them away, I might want them again. But now, well, my dear, you know I’ve all sorts of queer ideas—now I think I was probably intended to keep them that I might help you!”
That this question should be settled so easily and so well was more of a relief than perhaps Jean would have admitted even to herself. She had given the matter of her outfit for 106, Coburg Square, a good deal of anxious thought on her railway journey. She realized that the whole of her scheme would fail if the woman to whose employment she was going suspected that she was playing a part. She was too sensible to suppose that she would be able to pass herself off as a simple country girl of the working class, but she did hope that she would be able to make her employer believe that she was out to earn an honest living, in however humble a capacity.