Anne stood staring at her. “I do not believe it,” she exclaimed, turning her back. “If it were true, it would be a direct disrespect to me.”
From her point of view this was a charge hardly to be faced.
“It’s Gospel, for all that,” said the old woman.
Mrs. Walters’ eyes rested searchingly on her companion; the look was returned, and held all the difference between the two women’s characters.
“I shall ask him myself,” she said; “I shall soon find out if it is true.”
Having sent off her shaft, Nannie held her peace, and followed her mistress indoors, a little nervous, but auguring well from the cloud on Anne’s brow; a cloud accumulating, pregnant with storm.
[CHAPTER XXXI
THE WAY TO PARADISE]
MARY sat behind her counter sewing, for customers were not frequent, and she had plenty of time on her hands. June was well advanced, and the fact was proclaimed by a long spray of dog-roses which stood in a glass beside her. The bloom of the month had not passed her by, and her whole being was making good its losses with the elasticity of youth. Not that she did not carry in her face the same traces of sorrow she also bore in her heart; but as beauty, mental or physical, cannot be made perfect without suffering, it was a fairer woman sat under the light of the window among the fruits of gracious earth than the one who had parted from Rhys Walters at the Dipping-Pool for the last time, six months before. Time is a great healer, but his rival, Work, runs him hard, and though the former’s chance had yet to come with Mary, the latter had begun his ministration.
Now and then she would break into a snatch of song, and although it would end, for the most part, in a sigh and a long silence, it indicated a state of things impossible a little while ago. She lived very much alone, and but for the old woman who owned the shop and the occasional looker-in, who came to make purchases, she spoke to no one. Only when George Williams contrived to get into the town, and presented himself with a certain determined shyness at the door, did she have any touch with the human beings who surrounded her.