“And what am I to call you?”
“Oh! Molly would be a good name. Yes. Call me Molly,” and she held her new wedding ring before my eyes with a tantalising laugh.
“We shall have to be very careful to keep up the fiction,” I said. “These people will, no doubt, watch us at first.”
“I shall soon make friends of Mrs Williams,” she said. “Leave that to me. I can be circumspect enough when occasion requires. But—oh—I’d so love to smoke a cigarette.”
“A cigarette!” I cried, horrified; “women don’t smoke in this neighbourhood. Whatever you do, don’t smoke when I’m not here, they’ll smell it at once.”
“Yes,” she sighed. “The ideas of the poor people are quite different to ours, aren’t they?” she reflected.
At that moment there was a tap at the door, and the landlady begged leave to introduce her husband, a rather tall, well-set-up man with a closely-cropped dark beard.
He greeted me pleasantly, and expressed a hope that we should be comfortable.
“The missis will do all she can for Mrs Morton, I’m sure,” she said. “I hear you’re on night-work.”
“Yes, unfortunately,” I said, “our work is mostly at night, you know—getting ready the next day’s paper.”