“Never! He only told me that he was not on good terms with my uncle, and that for that reason he would leave me to learn the rest at the Gatehouse.”
“Well, that was right,” Basset answered. “It is as well, since you have to live with Mr. Audley, that you should not be prejudiced against him.”
“No doubt,” she said dryly. “But I do not understand why he did not answer my letters.”
“Did you write to him?”
“Twice.” She was going to explain the circumstances, but she refrained. Why appeal to the sympathies of one who seemed so cold, so distant, so indifferent?
“He cannot have had the letters,” Basset decided after a pause.
“Then how did he come to write to me at last?”
“Lord Audley sent your address to him.”
“Ah!” she said. “I supposed so.” With an air of finality she turned to the window, and for some time she was silent. Her mind had much upon which to work.
She was silent for so long that before more was said they were running through the outskirts of Birmingham, and Mary awoke with a shock to another and sadder side of England. In place of parks and homesteads she saw the England of the workers—workers at that time exploited to the utmost in pursuance of a theory of economy that heeded only the wealth of nations, and placed on that wealth the narrowest meaning. They passed across squalid streets, built in haste to meet the needs of new factories, under tall chimneys the smoke of which darkened the sky without hindrance, by vile courts, airless and almost sunless. They looked down on sallow children whose only playground was the street and whose only school-bell was the whistle that summoned them at dawn to premature toil. Haggard women sat on doorsteps with puling babes in their arms. Lines of men, whose pallor peered through the grime, propped the walls, or gazed with apathy at the train. For a few minutes Mary forgot not only her own hopes and fears, but the aloofness and even the presence of her companion. When they came to a standstill in the station, where they had to change on to the Grand Junction Railway, Basset had to speak twice before she understood that he wished her to leave the carriage.