“And wherever she is, she ought to go down on her knees and thank Gideon Vetch for the way he’s looked after you,” said the woman.

“But didn’t he look after her too?” asked the child.

At this the woman laughed shrilly, lifting the soaking clothes with her capable red hands, and then plunging them down into the soapsuds.”  Well, I reckon that’s more than the Lord Almighty would expect of him!” she replied emphatically but ambiguously.

“I wonder why Father never took me to see her.  I’m sure I’d have remembered it.”

The woman looked at her darkly.  “There are some places that children don’t go to.”

“How long ago did she die?”

Patty waited patiently for an answer; but when at last the neighbour raised her head again from the tub, it appeared that her reticence had extended from her speech to her expression which looked as if it had closed over something.  “You’ll have to ask your father that,” she returned in a phrase as cryptic as the preceding one.  “I ain’t here to tell you things.”

After this the child set her lips firmly together, and asked no more questions.  Her father had become not one parent, but both to her; and it seemed that whereever she looked he was always there, overshadowing like a mountain everything else on her horizon.  In the beginning they had been very poor; but he had never let her suffer for things, although for weeks at a time she knew that he had gone without his tobacco in order to buy her toys.  Until she went to the little village school, she had always had an old woman to look after her, and later on, when their circumstances appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim, gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her.  There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to live with her.

Rising from her chair, she moved away from the mirror, and wandered restlessly to the pile of fashion magazines and festively decorated “books on etiquette” that littered the table beside the chintz-covered couch.  “They don’t know everything!” she thought contemptuously.  How hard she had tried to learn, and yet how confused, how hopeless, it all seemed to her to-night!  All the hours that she had spent in futile study appeared to her wasted!  At her first dinner she had felt as bewildered and unhappy as if she had never opened one of those thick gaudy volumes that had cost so much—­as much as a box of chocolates every day for a week.  “I don’t care,” she said aloud, with sullen resolution.  “I am going to let them see that I don’t want any favours.”

The next afternoon she went out early in order to escape Gershom; but when she came in, after a restless wandering in shops and a short drive, she met him just as he was turning away from the door.

“Something told me I’d find you at this hour,” he remarked with unfailing good humour.  “Come out and walk about in the Square.  It will do you good.”