“Now, can I wait for my tea till I have washed and dressed?”

She argued with herself an instant as though she had been a greedy child, then, going swiftly into the back kitchen, she opened the door between her rooms and the Hurds.

“Minta!”

A voice responded.

“Minta, make me some tea and boil an egg! there’s a good soul!  I will be back directly.”

And in ten minutes or so she came back again into the sitting-room, daintily fresh and clean but very pale.  She had taken off her nurse’s dress and apron, and had put on something loose and white that hung about her in cool folds.

But Minta Hurd, who had just brought in the tea, looked at her disapprovingly.

“Whatever are you so late for?” she asked a little peevishly.  “You’ll get ill if you go missing your dinner.”

“I couldn’t help it, Minta, it was such a bad case.”

Mrs. Hurd poured out the tea in silence, unappeased.  Her mind was constantly full of protest against this nursing.  Why should Miss Boyce do such “funny things”—­why should she live as she did, at all?

Their relation to each other was a curious one.  Marcella, knowing that the life of Hurd’s widow at Mellor was gall and bitterness, had sent for her at the moment that she herself was leaving the hospital, offering her a weekly sum in return for a little cooking and house service.  Minta already possessed a weekly pension, coming from a giver unknown to her.  It was regularly handed to her by Mr. Harden, and she could only imagine that one of the “gentlemen” who had belonged to the Hurd Reprieve Committee, and had worked so hard for Jim, was responsible for it, out of pity for her and her children.  The payment offered her by Miss Boyce would defray the expense of London house-rent, the children’s schooling, and leave a trifle over.  Moreover she was pining to get away from Mellor.  Her first instinct after her husband’s execution had been to hide herself from all the world.  But for a long time her precarious state of health, and her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary Harden, made it impossible for her to leave the village.  It was not till Marcella’s proposal came that her way was clear.  She sold her bits of things at once, took her children and went up to Brown’s buildings.

Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from which the peasant’s wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often shrunk from it in the past.  Jim’s fate had made her an old woman at thirty-two.  She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open mouth.  But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about.  Marcella’s fixed mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of their fresh