“Good-afternoon, ma’am.”
The woman watched Mrs. Betty to her carriage, and then closed the door with an expression of rather sour relief. She turned to the flowers and parcels on the table, untied the string, and examined the contents.
“Wonder what she’s left ’em for;” such was Mrs. Ripstone’s solitary and cynical remark.
In her carriage Mrs. Betty was holding an enamelled scent-bottle to her nose.
“I wonder why they are so dirty and so reserved,” she thought; “I don’t think that woman was the least bit grateful. I don’t like the poor. Anyway, I have done my duty.”
The west was wreathed with the torn crimson of a wind-blown sky at sunset when Mrs. Betty drove home from her essay in almsgiving. St. Antonia’s spire, a black and slender wedge, seemed to cleave the vastness of the flaming west. The tall elms about the church were very restless with the wailing of the wind.
In Parker Steel’s dining-room there was an air of warmth and luxury, a sense of deep shelter from the blustering melancholy of the dying day. The table was laid for tea, a silver kettle singing above the spirit-lamp, a plate of hot cakes on the trivet before the piled-up fire. It was the hour of soft, slanting shadows, and of the wayward yet sleepy flickering of the flames. Betty swept into the room with the sensuous satisfaction of a cat. The thick Turkey carpet muffled her footsteps like the moss of a forest “ride.”
At the window, his figure outlined by the gold and purple of a fading sky, she saw her husband standing motionless, his head bent forward over an out-stretched hand. He appeared to be examining something closely in the twilight. She could see his keen, clear profile, intent and a little stern.
“Parker, Parker, the cakes are burning!”
Her husband turned with a start, taken unawares, like the hero of Wessex in the swineherd’s hut. Betty Steel had glided towards the fire.