“Yes, Johnny, that’s how she would say it. I’ll lay a guinea it’s old Granny Norton.”
“Granny Norton!” echoed the Squire. “She is respectable.”
“Respectable, honest, upright as the day,” replied Cole. “I have a great respect for old Mrs. Norton. She’s very poor now; but she was not always so.”
“She told us this morning that she lived in the cottage by the dung-heap,” I put in.
“Exactly: she does so. And a nice dung-heap it is; the disgrace of Islip,” added Cole.
“And you mean to say, Cole, that you know this woman—that she’s not a tramp, but Mrs. Norton?” spoke the pater.
“I know Mrs. Norton of Islip,” he answered. “I saw her pass my window this morning: she seemed to be coming from the railway-station. It was no tramp, Squire.”
“How was she dressed?” asked Mrs. Todhetley.
“Dressed? Well, her shawl was red, and her bonnet black. I’ve never seen her dressed otherwise, when abroad, these ten years past.”
“And—has she a daughter in service at Worcester?”