"Hugh McKissack," thought Connie, remembering the way in which his kind, short-sighted eyes peered through his glasses. Could men ever make you feel like that? Godfrey Neale, Freddy Mason, Captain Lancaster whom they had met at Broadstairs. She let a procession of "possibles" pass through her mind. At least if Hugh loved her he would take her away. "Let now thy servant depart in peace," thought Connie foolishly, "according to thy word. For my reproach hath been taken away from me. . . ." She felt strangely happy and yet urged by a strong desire to cry.
"Muriel, just see if that window is quite shut. There is such a draught."
"We're just there," said Muriel, peering through the rain-smeared glass, and wondering if she would be able to catch Mrs. Cartwright in the cloak-room to ask about the nursing subscriptions. Muriel's life had centred largely round the Nursing Club, ever since Mrs. Potter Vallery had taken up the Fallen Girls' Rescue Work, and Mrs. Hammond had abandoned the Club for her committee.
"Is there an awning up? I do hope that there is. Where is my bag, girls?"
The cars crawled forward, spilling their burdens of satin and furs and gleaming shirt fronts on to the damp red felt below the awning. As the Hammonds passed, a girl in a rain-soaked hat trimmed with wilting plumes called from the dingy group watching on the pavement:
"Good evening, Mrs. 'Ammond, 'opes you enjoy yourself!"
"Who was that girl?" asked Muriel, slipping off her cloak.
Her mother frowned. "One of the girls who used to be at St. Catherine's. They have no business to come and waste their time watching the people arriving at a dance. We got her into a decent situation too."
Muriel, who liked to see pretty things herself, thought, "Now that is just the sort of thing that I should have thought that those girls would have liked to do." For the streets of Kingsport on a winter evening were curiously devoid of colour, and the procession of pink and mauve and lemon-coloured cloaks gleamed like the lights from a revolving lantern down the pavement.
Connie murmured with a hairpin in her mouth, "What awful cheek." Being unconventional in her own behaviour at times through lack of self-control, she had little patience for other people who had suffered from an aggravation of the same offence. Muriel, whose behaviour was always scrupulously regulated, had more sympathy to spare for the exceptional. All the same, she did not know very much about St. Catherine's. Her mother would never let her go near the Home. It was not nice that unmarried girls should know about these things. Muriel, whose mind was singularly incurious, accepted without question the convention that only substantially married women could safely touch their fallen sisters. Her mother, Muriel heard, was most zealous in their cause, so firm, so sensible, so economical upon the House Committee. It had been her work upon that committee that had brought her to the notice of the Bishop. There was no doubting her ability. Better leave such work to her, thought Muriel; yet, as she clasped a bangle over her white glove in the cloak-room, the girl's eyes haunted her, mocking from the rain. Beyond this room with its cosy fire, beyond the decorous safety of Miller's Rise, lay a world of tears and darkness, of sudden joy and hopeless ruin. Muriel shivered, then followed Connie and her mother from the room. It was, at least, another world.