“They?” Henrietta murmured, hanging back and growing more alarmed. It was a pity that there was no man there to see how pretty she looked in her disorder.
“Ay, they!” the landlady answered. And a keen ear might have detected sorrow as well as displeasure in her tone. “There’s many will be poking their noses into your affairs now you’ll find—when it’s too late to prevent them. But do you come, young woman!” She led the way along the landing to a window which looked down on the side-garden. After a brief hesitation Henrietta followed, her face grown sullen. Alas! when she reached the window it needed but a look to enlighten her.
One of the things, which she had feared the previous day, had come to pass! A little snow had fallen while she was absent from the house; so very little that she had not noticed it. But it had lain, and on its white surface was published this morning in damning characters the story of her flittings to and fro. And worse, early as it was, the story had readers! Leaning on the garden wicket were two or three men discussing the appearances, and pointing and arguing; and forty or fifty yards along the road towards Bowness, a man, bent double, was tracing the prints of her feet, as if he followed a scent.
It was for that, then, that they wanted her shoes. She understood, and her first impulse was to indignation. It was an outrage! An insult!
“What is it to them?” she cried. “How dare they!”
Mrs. Gilson looked keenly at her under her vast bushy eyebrows.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that you’ll find they’ll dare a mort more than that before they’ve done, my girl. And what they want to know they’ll learn. These,” coolly lifting the shoes to sight, “are to help them.”
“But why should they—what is it to them if I——” she stopped, unwilling to commit herself.
“You listen to me a minute,” the landlady said. “You’ve brought your pigs to a poor market, that’s plain: and there is but one thing can help you now, and that is a clean breast. Now you make up your mind to it! There’s nought else can help you, I say again, and that I tell you! It’s no child’s play, this! The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as they say at the assizes, is the only thing for you, if you don’t want to be sorry for it all the rest of your life.”
She spoke so seriously that Henrietta when she answered took a lower tone; though she still protested.