It was a woman, spare and pale, in black that was green, but brushed to threadbareness.
"Do you mind," he asked, "telling me why you want to go?"
"I've got relations there, sir," said the woman in black, raising to his the plaintive blue eyes of a child set in a face that fifty years and more had wrinkled like a February apple. "My husband's relations, that is. They might do something to help me. I might be able to be of use to them, just to work out my keep. It isn't much I require. But I couldn't--"
She stopped, and Edward Basingstoke knew that she couldn't even bring herself to name the great terror of the poor--the living tomb which the English call the workhouse.
"I'm afraid you've had a hard time," said Mr. Basingstoke.
"I had many happy days," she said, simply. "I always think you pay for everything you have, sooner or later. And I'm paying now. I don't grudge it, but I'd like to end respectable. And thank you for asking so kindly, sir, and now I'll be getting on." And he saw in her eyes the fear that he would offer her money to pay her way to Droitwich.
Instead he said: "We're motoring your way this afternoon. If you'll let us give you a lift--"
The woman looked from one to the other. "Well," she said, "I do call that kind. But I wasn't asking for any help. And I'd best be getting on."
Then the other woman came quite close to the woman in black. "Won't you," she said, "come and have dinner with us--and then we'll drive you over? Do come. We're so happy and we do hate to think that you aren't. Perhaps we can think of some way to help you . . . find you some work or something," she added, hastily, answering the protest in the blue eyes.
"I don't like to, miss," she said, "thanking you all the same. It's truly good of you--but--"
Edward moved away a pace or two and lit a cigarette. He never knew what his lady said to the woman in black, but when he turned again a handkerchief was being restored to a rubbed black leather reticule and the woman in black was saying,
"Well, ma'am, since you say that, of course I can't say no, and thank you kindly."
The three had dinner together in the little private room over the porch at the Warwick Arms, and as they passed through the hall there could have been, for the little woman in black, no better armor against the sniffs of chambermaids and the cold eyes of the lady in the glass case than the feel of another woman's hand on her arm. She was very silent and shy, but not awkward or clumsy, during the meal, and when it was finished Edward got up and said,