"Where? What? This?" Feelingly the woman exhibited a nice, big package.
"Why, the things I bought for you!"
"And do you for a moment suppose that I am going to carry a bundle?"
"Saints alive, child! Didn't you tell me----"
But now Paliser, in his cultured voice, intervened. "If I may have it?"
He took it, moved to the window, leaned from it, called: "Mike! You see
this? Then see too that you don't muff it."
The bundle vanished.
He turned to Cassy. "I telephoned to Dr. Grantly. He is a clergyman. It
might seem uncivil to keep him waiting."
Cassy saw him at once--a starchy old man, with a white tie and little
side whiskers, who lived--and would die--in a closed circle of thought.
Then again that nothing touched her, though, because of the others, more
lightly, less surely. But it touched her. She was quite conscious of it,
equally conscious that there was still time, that she could still
desist, that she had only to say that she would not, that she had
changed her mind and tell them no, right out and be hanged to them. On
the strawberry of her tongue it trembled. At once before her there
floated another picture, the picture of a shabby old man, without a
penny in the world, or a hope save in her.
She stood up.
"Dearie, dearie, I wish you joy, I do!" the fat woman sobbed, or
appeared to sob, and everything being possible, it may be that she did
not sob. La joie fait peur. She had done her part. On the morrow a
cheque would reach her. "Dearie, dearie!"
"Don't be a fool," Cassy frigidly threw at her.
"Will you take my arm?" Paliser asked.
"Don't be a fool either," she threw at him and bravely, head up, went on
to the events that waited.
In the street below a strain overtook her. Ma Tamby was amusing herself
with "Lohengrin."