‘My second name is. And my surname. Poor mother married her cousin.’
‘As everybody does here.... Well, Ann or otherwise, you are Avice to me. And you have lost her now?’
‘I have, sir.’
She spoke in the very same sweet voice that he had listened to a score of years before, and bent eyes of the same familiar hazel inquiringly upon him.
‘I knew your mother at one time,’ he said; ‘and learning of her death and burial I took the liberty of calling upon you. You will forgive a stranger doing that?’
‘Yes,’ she said dispassionately, and glancing round the room: ‘This was mother’s own house, and now it is mine. I am sorry not to be in mourning on the night of her funeral, but I have just been to put some flowers on her grave, and I took it off afore going that the damp mid not spoil the crape. You see, she was bad a long time, and I have to be careful, and do washing and ironing for a living. She hurt her side with wringing up the large sheets she had to wash for the Castle folks here.’
‘I hope you won’t hurt yourself doing it, my dear.’
‘O no, that I sha’n’t! There’s Charl Woollat, and Sammy Scribben, and Ted Gibsey, and lots o’ young chaps; they’ll wring anything for me if they happen to come along. But I can hardly trust ‘em. Sam Scribben t’other day twisted a linen tablecloth into two pieces, for all the world as if it had been a pipe-light. They never know when to stop in their wringing.’
The voice truly was his Avice’s; but Avice the Second was clearly more matter-of-fact, unreflecting, less cultivated than her mother had been. This Avice would never recite poetry from any platform, local or other, with enthusiastic appreciation of its fire. There was a disappointment in his recognition of this; yet she touched him as few had done: he could not bear to go away. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘Going in nineteen.’