"I don't see that that has anything much to do with it, Janet." Sarah rose, and began to clear the parish magazines and bound volumes of Punch, and baskets of sewing that were piled upon her corner table.
"I can't see why there should be a strike just round about Anderby. It all seems very strange. I'm sure I'm sorry for Mary." Anne sighed a little, folding up her work.
"As far as I can see, she only has herself to blame," said Ursula. "She jolly well asked for trouble, rubbing up the backs of half the men in the village in the way she did. Why, when I was staying there, she had a frightful quarrel with the schoolmaster about some boy or other, and it appears from what Foster says that this man is behind most of the trouble."
"Foster was down there yesterday, wasn't he?"
"Yes." Ursula smiled with satisfaction. "I sent him down to see if there was anything we could do. Of course we are most sorry for them both, especially John. For I'm sure, after the way he's worked like a negro, getting the mortgage paid off Mary's farm, the least she could have done was to have made things as easy for him as possible."
"Did Foster say if John was keeping well?" Sarah would have given much to go herself to Anderby. The consciousness that in John's hour of difficulty no one but Mary was with him, and that she apparently had only increased his troubles, was gall and wormwood to Sarah.
"Oh, he was going on all right so far, I believe. Though of course all this sort of thing must be fearfully bad for him. I really can't imagine what Mary was doing to let it happen. If she had any of the influence you all used to boast she had over the village, I'm sure she could have stopped it. From what Foster gathered, she just was as tactless as she possibly could have been—slanged the men fearfully when they might have come in, and lost her temper absolutely at the end. Really, you know, one sometimes wonders what she'll do next. She either has extraordinary notions of behaviour or very little self-control—though, of course, I always feel inclined to excuse her a great deal, because she hasn't any children."
"Well, I'm sure if Mary was wise, she would take John away from Anderby," commented Louisa. She was now helping Sarah, who arranged plates of queen cakes and jam tarts on the corner table as grimly as though she were laying out a corpse. "After a stroke he ought not to have to face all these new conditions."
"No, I'm sure." Janet Holmes sighed sympathetically. "I know so well what it is for an invalid with shattered nerves to have to face all sorts of changes. When I came back from Harrogate, absolutely exhausted by the treatment there, and found that Lily had given notice, and I had to engage a new cook——"
"Pass me the kettle, please, Anne. Janet, I suppose you are allowed to have a cup of tea?" interrupted Sarah.