“What woman?”

“She that went by a moment since.”

“She in the blue cloak, d’ee mean?—­an old, ancient, wisht-lookin’ body?”

“Yes.”

“A timmersome woman, like?”

“That’s it.”

“Well, her name’s Cordely Pinsent.”

The procession reclaimed his attention.  He received a passing wink from the charioteer, caught it on the volley and returned it with a solemn face; or rather, the wink seemed to rebound as from a blank wall.  As the crowd closed in upon the circumstance of Justice, he turned to me again, spat, and went on—­

“—­Cordely Pinsent, widow of old Key Pinsent, that was tailor to all the grandees in the county so far back as I can mind.  She’s eighty-odd; eighty-five if a day.  I can just mind Key Pinsent—­a great, red, rory-cumtory chap, with a high stock and a wig like King George—­’my royal patron’ he called ‘en, havin’ by some means got leave to hoist the king’s arms over his door.  Such mighty portly manners, too—­Oh, very spacious, I assure ’ee!  Simme I can see the old Trojan now, with his white weskit bulgin’ out across his doorway like a shop-front hung wi’ jewels.  Gout killed ‘en.  I went to his buryin’; such a stretch of experience does a young man get by time he reaches my age.  God bless your heart alive, I can mind when they were hung for forgery!”

“Who were hung?”

“People,” he answered vaguely; “and young Willie Pinsent.”

“This woman’s son?”

“Ay, her son—­her ewe-lamb of a child.  ’Tis very seldom brought up agen her now, poor soul!  She’s so very old that folks forgits about it.  Do ’ee see her window yonder, over the ope?”

He was pointing across to the soiled white blind that still looked blankly over the street, its lower edge caught up at one corner by a dusty geranium.

“I saw her pull it down.”

“Ah, you would if you was lookin’ that way.  I’ve a-seed her do ’t a score o’ times.  Well, when the gout reached Key Pinsent’s stomach and he went off like the snuff of a candle at the age of forty-two, she was left unprovided, with a son of thirteen to maintain or go ’pon the parish.  She was a Menhennick, tho’, from t’other side o’ the Duchy—­a very proud family—­and didn’t mean to dip the knee to nobody, and all the less because she’d demeaned hersel’, to start with, by wedding a tailor.  But Key Pinsent by all allowance was handsome as blazes, and well-informed up to a point that he read Shakespeare for the mere pleasure o’t.

“Well, she sold up the stock-in-trade an’ hired a couple o’ rooms—­the self-same rooms you see:  and then she ate less ‘n a mouse an’ took in needle-work, plain an’ fancy:  for a lot o’ the gentry’s wives round the neighbourhood befriended her—­though they had to be sly an’ hide that they meant it for a favour, or she’d ha’ snapped their heads off.  An’ all the while, she was teachin’ her boy and tellin’ ’en, whatever happened, to remember he was a gentleman, an’ lovin’ ’en with all the strength of a desolate woman.