“You would have no need of strangers eating you up if you had us,” her sister-in-law said, as she stooped to kiss her ostentatiously, and held the child up to repeat the salute ere she went away.
Winifred had kissed the young mother almost with emotion in the midst of her pleading; but somehow this return of the embrace gave a slight shock both to her delicacy and pride. She laughed a little and coloured when Miss Farrell, after the door closed, looked at her astonished. “You think I have grown into wonderful intimacy with Mrs. George?” she said.
“I do indeed, Winnie. My dear, I would not interfere, but you must not let your kind heart carry you too far.”
“Oh, my kind heart!” cried the girl, feeling a desperate irony in the words. “She suggests that they should live with me,” she added, turning her head away.
“Live with you? Winnie! my dear!” Miss Farrell gasped, with a sharp break between each word.
“She thinks it will arrange itself so, quite simply—oh, it is quite simple! Dear Miss Farrell, don’t say anything. I have been pushing it off. I have been pretending to be ill because I was miserable. Let me get up now—and don’t say anything,” she added after a moment, with lips that trembled in spite of herself. “There are no—letters; no one—has been here?”
“Nothing, Winnie.” Her friend did not look at her; she dared not betray her too profound sympathy, her personal anguish, even by a kiss.
When Winifred came downstairs she found Mr. Babington waiting for her. He was a very old acquaintance, whom she had not been used to think of as a friend; but trouble makes strange changes in the aspect of things around us, turning sometimes those whom we have loved most into strangers, and lighting up faces that have been indifferent to us with new lights of compassion and sympathy. Mr. Babington’s formal manner, his well-known features, so composed and commonplace, his grey, keen eyes under their bushy eyebrows, suddenly took a new appearance to Winifred. They seemed to shine upon her with the warmth of ancient friendship. She had known him all her life, yet, it seemed, had never known him till to-day. He came to meet her, holding out his hand, with some kind, ordinary questions about her health, but all the while a light put out, as it were, at the windows of his soul, to help her, another poor soul stumbling along in the darkness. It was not anything that he said, nor that she said. She did not ask for any help, nor he offer it; and yet in a moment Winifred felt herself, in her mind, clinging to him with the sense that here was an old, old friend, somebody, above all doubt and uncertainty, in whom she could trust.
“Miss Winifred,” he said, “I am afraid, though you don’t seem much like it, that we must talk of business.”
“Yes; I wish it, Mr. Babington. I am only foolish and troubled—not ill at all.”