"Goodness!" said Winnington—"I can't shew you more than two or three cripples to a village. Maumsey only rejoices in two. My county school will collect from the whole county. And I should never have found out the half of them, if it hadn't been for Susy Amberley."
"How did she discover them?" asked Delia, without any sort of cordiality.
"We—the County Council—put the enquiry into her hands. I showed her—a bit. But she's done it admirably. She's a wonderful little person, Susy. What the old parents will do without her when she goes to London I can't think."
"Why is she going?"
Winnington shrugged his shoulders kindly.
"Wants a training—wants something more to do. Quite right—if it makes her happy. You women have all grown so restless nowadays." He laughed into the rather sombre face beside him. And the face lit up—amazingly.
"Because the world's so marvellous," said Delia, with her passionate look. "And there's so little time to explore it in. You men have always known that. Now we women know it too."
He pondered the remark—half smiling.
"Well, you'll see a good deal of it before you've done," he said at last. "Now come and look at what I've been trying to do for the women who complained to you."
And he shewed her how everything had been arranged to please her, at the cost of infinite trouble, and much expense. The woman with the eight children had been moved into a spacious new cottage made out of two old ones; the old granny alone in a house now too big for her, had been induced to take in a prim little spinster, the daughter of a small grocer just deceased; and the father of the deficient girl, for whom Miss Dempsey had made herself responsible, received Winnington with a lightening of his tired eyes, and taking him out of earshot of Delia, told him how Bessie "had got through her trouble," and was now earning money at some simple hand-work under Miss Dempsey's care.