The beaten and battered Titania crept up the oily estuary waters of Southampton as one by one the shaking passengers began to emerge on deck, most of them for the first time. They walked up and down, talking in shocked whispers and staring in awe at the battered superstructure of the ship. The ship’s doctor bustled from cabin to cabin with his black bag, ministering to those who had not yet recovered from the horrendous journey.
The Maguire sisters huddled together for comfort beside the rail and stared in dismay at what they could make out of their new homeland. A steady drizzle was falling from a dark-gray sky. The clouds were so low that they lay in great sodden masses along the low hills of the Southampton estuary. It all looked bleak and unfriendly and foreign.
Both were reflecting dismally on what Miss Simms had told them in a fit of drunken venom. “Think you’re going to marry lords?” the ex-schoolteacher had hiccuped. “Why, they’ll laugh in your faces.”
“B-but Lady Fanny—” Molly had stuttered.
“Her!” sneered Miss Simms. “She’d groom a pair of Hottentots for the London Season. She’s being paid to do it. You’re nobody special.”
It was then that Molly had felt a cold rage taking possession of her.
“You, Miss Simms,” she said with an edge to her voice that Mary had never heard her use before, “are also being paid to be a companion and not a drunken, venomous mentor. I am dismissing you.”
“You always were a fresh kid,” retorted Miss Simms indifferently. “Cheese it. You ain’t firing nobody. Your pa hired me and your pa fires me. So there.”
She had then turned back to her ever constant companion, her bottle of gin, leaving Molly to stare at her with baffled fury.
Now as they stood at the rail, Mary said suddenly, “Perhaps if we behave very badly, Lady Fanny will send us home.”
Molly straightened her spine and stared out at the dark shores of England. “No we won’t, Mary. We’re American. We’re democratic. We’ll do our best, and if they don’t like it, they can send us home.” A sudden vision of the cosy shop in Jane Street, with its cluttered sacks and cans of goods, its smell of spices and coffee and candy, sprang into her mind; a little world shielded from the dark by the warm flare of the gaslight. And then she realized that her home was gone and her parents—two posturing strangers she did not recognize. Two salt tears rolled down her cheeks, adding their moisture to that of the now steadily falling rain.
The bustle of departure from the ship went by like a rain-soaked dream. The press swarmed over the Titania, taking photographs of the storm damage and lightening the dark day with their magnesium flashes. Ignoring a very white-faced Miss Simms, the Maguire sisters walked arm in arm to the barrier and noticed, still as if in a dream, that a smartly dressed footman was holding up a placard bearing their names.
In no time at all, they were cosily tucked up in rugs in a large traveling carriage and bowling away from the bustle of the port, with the coachman gaily cracking his whip and two enormous footmen perched up behind.
Molly was glad to see that Miss Simms was beginning to look cowed. The Maguire sisters had been treated with every deference and Miss Simms with practically none at all. In fact, one of the footmen had taken a contemptuous sniff of the strong aroma of gin that surrounded the companion, had given Miss Simms one scandalized look, and then retreated to his post. Miss Simms began to chew peppermint pastilles as hard as she could and kept muttering that she wished she had not come.
Their journey was broken at a large inn and it was there that Molly first became aware of how strange they must look.
Both girls were dressed in their green-and-white plaid school dresses covered with their best starched aprons. All their clothes were to be bought for them in England so Mrs. Maguire had thoughtlessly provided nothing new for the journey. Molly had grown since leaving school and she realized, to her embarrassment, that she was showing an unseemly expanse of ankle. The dining room of the inn seemed to her unsophisticated eyes to be extremely richly furnished, with its deep turkey-red carpet and its small, glittering chandeliers.
Every time she said something to Mary, everyone in the dining room would stop eating. They did not stare, they were too polite for that. They simply sat and listened and then leaned their heads together and whispered. Molly had cut up her roast beef and vegetables and was eating it all with her fork. But this, she realized, was completely the wrong thing to do. It seemed one must use both knife and fork at the same time and hold them rather like pencils. It was all very strange.
All too soon they were back on the road, bowling between high hedgerows that filled the carriage with green gloom, up little rises past tiny farms—like farms in a children’s storybook.
Molly’s head was beginning to droop. The lunch had been heavy and she was feeling sleepy.
“Hadseal” called the coachman, and she straightened up. Mary and Miss Simms had both fallen asleep, the latter snoring with her mouth open and her once jaunty straw hat askew. Molly let down the carriage window and looked out. The carriage was winding down a steep road. On the right, the sea seemed to stretch to infinity, and as they turned another bend the heavy clouds parted and a broad, sparkling ray of sunshine lit up the little town nestling in the curve of the bay.
The clouds parted more and more as the carriage wound down the hill. Colors sprang magically out of the dark landscape. Great clumps of sea pinks clung to outcrops in the springy turf, harebells quivered in a light breeze, a whole field of buttercups blazed out to welcome the return of summer, and brightly painted fishing boats bobbed and danced at anchor on a sea of pure aquamarine. And a long curve of golden sand bordered with little creamy waves stretched around the length of the bay.
The Maguire sisters and summer had arrived at Hadsea.
Lady Fanny Holden gave a final authoritative twitch to a vase full of roses and, having decided that they had been properly disciplined, turned to her husband, Lord Toby, as the next thing that needed to be put in order.
“Now, Toby,” she barked, “it’s no use standing there shuffling and muttering in that irritating way that it’s all a bore. The gels will be here shortly and you must change. You are not an example of an English gentleman of the aristocracy in that filthy old tweed jacket. I shall never forget the humiliation the day I gave it to the church sale and found that you had bought it back.”
Lady Fanny was an energetic woman in her fifties, with thick white skin, pale-blue eyes, and well-ordered salt-and-pepper hair. She was inclined to be plump but kept the unseemly bulges rigorously at bay in the confines of a long Empire corset.
Her husband had a hunted air. He was tall and thin with thick fair hair, a fair mustache that he kept fingering nervously, and rather bulging weak eyes. He was at that moment dressed in the offending jacket, an old pair of knickerbockers, worsted socks, and elderly brogues cracked and trodden into comfort. Sometimes it seemed to him that his whole married life had been a desperate search for ease and comfort, constantly stymied by the rigorous discipline of his wife.
For one whole beautiful summer last year he had enjoyed the peace of Hadsea while his wife chafed at the inactivity. He had pottered in the garden, stared at the sea, gone for long walks with his silent dogs, and occasionally dropped into the Prince of Wales down by the pier for a pint. Now all that had fled. His wife had insisted that they needed more money. Hadsea had become fashionable. Already other titles—the sort of bores one tried to avoid at the club—were all around, alive and well, doing Larsen exercises on the beach and generally mucking up the scenery.
Any money for the tutoring of the Maguire sisters seemed to have been used up already on a too-large army of supercilious servants who kept popping out of the shrubbery like damned jack-in-the-boxes to light his bloody cigar when he least bloody wanted it lit! His beloved garden was now the property of two crusty, gnarled Scottish gnomes with their numerous undergardeners who had a positive mania for making straight lines and bordering them with the shells from last night’s dinner. It was downright upsetting to see the remains of one’s moules rémoulade keeping a bed of petunias at bay.
Driven from the sitting room by the noise of carriage wheels outside and the impatient cluckings of his wife, he muttered and pottered his way upstairs.
Lady Fanny adjusted her enormous white lace hat to precisely the right angle—one inch more to the left would be rakish and one more to the right would be common—and turned with a smile of welcome on her face.
The Maguire sisters stood in the doorway, holding hands and looking at her “as if I had come out of the Ark” as she often said afterward.
Lady Fanny’s opening words were typical. “Oh, dear, dear, dear. Those clothes. Horrid. What can your mama have been thinking of? And what’s that?”
“Miss Simms. Our…er…companion,” said Molly weakly.
“Then take it away. It won’t do,” said Lady Fanny, waving her gloved hand.
Miss Simms pushed past the sisters into the room. “Are you talking about me?”
“And you poor girls must be so exhausted after your journey,” said Lady Fanny, ignoring Miss Simms completely. She touched the bell. “Wembley,” she said to a stern individual in a striped waistcoat, “send for Miss Betts—the dressmaker, you know—and despatch this back to America.”
Molly looked around the sitting room, over the tapestried chairs with their curled gilt arms; at her reflection in the old greenish mirror over the fireplace; at the bowls of flowers; but there was no sign of a package for America. Then she realized that Lady Fanny had been referring to Miss Simms.
So did Miss Simms.
“You can’t do this,” yelled that unfortunate lady. “You’re worse’n the Bowery gangs.”
Lady Fanny deigned to notice Miss Simms. “What’s your name, woman?”
“It’s Euphemia Simms.”
“Well, Simms, from the smell of you and from your manner, you’d be far better back on the other side of the Atlantic. Good God! I do believe the woman is going to argue. Take her away, Wembley.”
“Very good, my lady,” said the butler, easing the infuriated companion toward the door. “There is a boat from Southampton tomorrow morning.”
Miss Simms let out a despairing squawk. “Say something, Molly,” she shrilled. But Molly remembered the isolation of Brooklyn Heights and the insolence of the boat and turned away. So Miss Simms departed from the room and their lives, leaving behind a faint odor of gin and peppermints.
The girls stood awkwardly while Lady Fanny walked around them, tugging at a crease here and a fold there. Both girls were wearing depressing felt hats: the kind, called by English schoolchildren, “pudding basin.” With one large white muscular hand, Lady Fanny twitched the offending headgear first from Molly’s head and then Mary’s. The springy, black, glossy curls came tumbling in a cascade down the girls’ backs and Lady Fanny caught her breath. Why, the girls were beautiful! Molly had perhaps too much determination in her square chin, but Mary’s little heart-shaped face was perfection itself.
Molly found her courage and her voice. “If you please,” she said firmly, “we are both very tired and would like to wash and change.”
“Of course, of course,” said Lady Fanny briskly. Another touch of the bell and the efficient Wembley was sent to fetch the housekeeper, Mrs. Barkins. Mrs. Barkins led the girls up a wide sunny staircase to the bedrooms. The house was quite modern, late Victorian, Molly judged. It was, she had gathered, the Holdens’ summer residence. Lady Fanny had described it to Mrs. Maguire as their “little summer cottage—very rustic.” The little cottage boasted at least thirty bedrooms. It was a vast, sprawling mansion, built like a small castle with mock battlements and even a few fake arrow slits let into the walls.
But the architect had fortunately not carried his passion for medievalism as far as the windows, which were large and square, affording glimpses of a perfect English garden, complete with tennis courts, rolling lawns, English oaks, and a gazebo.
Mrs. Barkins pushed open a heavy mahogany door. “This will be your room, miss,” she said to Molly. She then led the way through a bright rose-decorated room that opened onto a little sitting room, on the far side of which was a door that led to Mary’s room.
Both girls turned dark red with embarrassment when they realized that their small stock of shabby clothes had been neatly hung away and their worn and darned undergarments placed in the drawers.
“Goodge will be your maid,” said Mrs. Barkins, who was a stout, motherly woman with eyes as hard as pebbles and whose aprons and petticoats crackled with so much starch that she emitted a sharp series of noises like little pistol shots every time she moved. “Goodge is a local girl,” Mrs. Barkins was saying. “I trust you will see that she does her work properly.”
“That is surely your job,” said Molly sweetly.
Mrs. Barkins looked at her in amazement. She had been looking forward to a mild spot of bullying. After all, Americans were heathens and didn’t know what was what. But this young American had a steely glint in her eye and a firm set to her jaw. Mrs. Barkins reluctantly dropped a curtsy.
“I’ll see to it, miss.”
When the door had closed behind her, Molly found that her hands were trembling. What did one do with a maid? She had never ordered anyone around in all her young life.
But when Goodge appeared, a shy apple-faced girl not much older than Molly herself, and stood in the doorway with her eyes down, twisting her apron nervously in her hands, Molly recovered her courage.
“Now, Goodge,” she said, “you will find that we are not used to having a lady’s maid and you, I gather, are new to the work. I guess we’ll manage somehow between us. Okay?”
“Oh, yes, miss,” said the gratified Goodge, saving up that deliciously foreign “Okay” for use in the kitchen.
“We have not yet got our new wardrobes,” Molly went on, “so you’ll just need to pick out the best we have.”
She gave the maid a beautiful smile. Molly had a warm and charming smile that had already broken many hearts in Fulton Street, and the shy and timid Goodge was completely bowled over.
She, Goodge, would be the best lady’s maid ever. She marched briskly over to the wardrobe and picked out Molly’s Sunday dress, of drab brown taffeta, with a sure hand.
“This will be just the thing, miss,” said Goodge. “My lady is with the dressmaker now and you are to have ever such lovely clothes.” Goodge set to work.
Molly found to her surprise that it was a pleasant novelty to be waited on. To have deft little hands to fasten up all those awkward hooks and buttons and to gently brush one’s tangled hair.
Mary was still very shy. “Come to my room when she does me,” she whispered.
The next hour went by with bewildering speed as the exhausted girls were turned this way and that and pinned and measured and fitted for new clothes. Then there was tea with Lady Fanny, but both felt too tired and nervous to eat any of the tiny sandwiches or luscious cakes.
At last they were told that they might take a walk in the garden before dinner. They walked away from the house, sedately arm in arm, and then, as one, began to run as soon as they were out of sight of the house. They ended up, panting and breathless, in a little wood through which they could see the chimneys of the house next door.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to take much of this,” said Molly when they at last found a fallen log to sit on. “What say we write to Ma and ask her to fetch us home?”
“Oh, Molly,” breathed Mary, “if only we could.”
“Well, I don’t see why not,” said Molly bracingly. “It’s like living with a sergeant major. I was so hungry at tea but she kept putting me off my food with her ‘No, no! You must hold the teapot so.’ And, ugh, that China tea. I’d have given anything for a really strong cup of coffee. I—”
She broke off, as a loud masculine voice could be heard from the garden next door. “Damn and blast this dead—alive hole,” it said.
Both girls giggled nervously. “Let’s go see,” whispered Molly. “Sounds like a fellow spirit.”
They got up and walked quietly through the trees, over a springy carpeting of moss. A crumbling fern-covered stone wall marked the boundary between the Holdens’ property and next door. A screen of trees blocked the view of the neighboring garden. Mary tugged at Molly’s sleeve in a kind of pleading way but Molly was determined to have a look at this angry neighbor.
Pulling Mary behind her, she edged her way along the wall until she came to a gap in the trees. She found herself looking along a sort of narrow green tunnel of briars and bushes to a vista of cool lawns and garden chairs. One of the chairs suddenly went flying and there, in the gap, was the angry neighbor. He was a tall, swarthy, harsh-featured young man. His black slanting eyebrows under hair as thick and black as Molly’s own gave him a Satanic look. He was wearing an old pair of riding breeches and an open-necked white shirt that accentuated his tan.
He was slashing at the bushes with a riding crop in a moody, vicious way.
Molly responded this time to Mary’s tugging. Both turned and scampered back through the wood.
“Isn’t he terrible,” gasped Molly when they felt it safe to speak. “He looks like the devil!”
“Gels! Gels!” summoned an imperative voice from the house. Feeling as if they were back in school, the two sisters trudged toward the mansion.
Lady Fanny was dressed in a long velvet dinner gown, showing exactly the correct expanse of bosom in front and the correct amount of vertebrae behind.
“You are no longer schoolgirls,” was her opening remark. “You are covered in bits of leaves. Retire to your rooms and change for dinner immediately. On second thought, perhaps you have nothing to change into. Get yourselves brushed up and don’t be long. We dine in twenty minutes.”
In less than the twenty minutes, the Maguires were timidly seated at an expanse of dining table and the nightmare began. “You must learn to take a little wine,” ordered Lady Fanny. “Fill their glasses, James,” she ordered a footman.
Mary rebelled. “I don’t gotta take wine if’n I don’t wanna.”
Lady Fanny closed her eyes as if in pain. “This is going to be worse than I thought. You must have elocution lessons as soon as possible. Do not use double negatives, Mary. A little wine will do you no harm. No, Molly, one does not eat asparagus with a knife and fork. With the fingers, girl. The fingers.”
Both girls occasionally looked toward Lord Toby. Several times he made a few deep rumblings as if indicating that he was about to erupt into speech, but each time Fanny quelled whatever it was he was about to say with one pale, cold eye.
Molly and Mary labored through exotic course after course, praying that each one might be the last. “Are you enjoying your first English dinner?” queried Lady Fanny.
“Sure. Swell,” said Mary dreamily. The wine was going to her head.
“There will be ready-made clothes arriving for you on the morrow,” said Lady Fanny. “These will have to do until your other clothes are ready. You must be prepared to change at least six times a day.”
Molly choked on her food. “Six times!” she exclaimed in dismay. “That doesn’t leave us time to do anything else.”
“There will be plenty of time,” retorted Lady Fanny. “You will be busy at first with your lessons. You must have elocution lessons. Not so much you, Molly. There is no harm in an American accent, in fact some gentlemen find it piquant, but Mary’s grammar needs attention. Then you must have dancing lessons and lessons in deportment.”
Molly made a bid for freedom. “I honestly don’t think we’re going to make it, Lady Fanny,” she pleaded. “Why don’t you just let us catch the next boat to Brooklyn?”
“Nonsense! You will like it well enough when you start going to balls and parties and see all the handsomest men in England falling at your feet.”
It may have been the effect of the wine or it may just have been Molly’s very feminine soul, but the thought of handsome Englishmen falling at her feet was suddenly infinitely appealing.
Anything further, however, that she might have wished to say was cut short by an appalled squawk from Lady Fanny. Mary had been eyeing a bowl of cool water in front of her plate. It looked very tempting, with little slivers of lemon floating in it. She raised it in both hands and took a deep drink.
“Good Heavens!” shrieked the appalled Lady Fanny. “Toby, do look! She drank from the finger bowl.”
“So what!” muttered Mary dismally. “What a mazuma.”
Lord Toby suddenly found his voice. “Leave ’em alone, Fanny. Give ’em time to run about a bit. Not much more than little gels, ain’t they? Plenty of time for lessons.”
“I don’t know what you’re butting in for,” snapped Lady Fanny, but her husband held her glare without flinching. “Oh, very well. You may have a little holiday for the next few days. Get to know the place. Your parents are allowing you a very generous allowance. You will receive it from me each Monday morning.”
Things began to look definitely brighter. Molly felt almost happy. Then she remembered the man next door and decided that it would be a useful way of turning the conversation away from themselves.
That’s a very angry-looking neighbor you have,” she remarked.
“Which side?” asked Lord Toby, showing a spark of interest.
“The left.”
“Oh, that must be poor Lord David Manley,” sighed Fanny. “Nobody has seen him but he is supposed to be a very handsome man. And so rich! He contracted consumption, you know, and everyone thought he would die. But his doctor sent him to a sanatorium in Switzerland and he has been miraculously cured, they say. Poor boy. He bought the villa next door and is said to be convalescing.”
“I don’t think it could possibly have been Lord David,” said Molly. “This man was very healthy and muscular and too harsh-featured to be called handsome.”
“I believe his parents presented him with some sort of male nurse,” said Lady Fanny. “That’s probably who it was. Poor Lord David. He must still be very sickly.”
A gentle snore and a small thump interrupted their conversation. Mary, overcome by the unaccustomed wine and masses of exotic food, had slowly slipped under the table and gone to sleep.
The following Sunday morning found the Maguire sisters to be the first members of the household awake. Breakfast, they remembered, was not until eleven o’clock. They would stroll down to the town and take a look around. Mary was complaining of a headache and Molly pointed out that fresh air would be just the thing to blow it away.
It was a pure, clear sunny morning. They walked down the drive, pushed open the great iron gates, and marched out into the road with a feeling of having escaped from prison.
They hesitated a little and then decided Hadsea must be on their left.
“Goddamnit, man,” roared the well-remembered voice of the man who must be Lord David’s nurse. “What the hell do you call this filth? I want coffee, good, strong dark coffee. Take this pap away and feed it to the cat.” There was a sound of breaking china.
“Poor Lord David,” murmured Molly. “Can you imagine how he must be bullied by that dreadful nurse?” She pictured a frail and beautiful aristocrat lying weakly on his sickbed, one blue-veined hand plucking restlessly at the covers, fair hair falling over a marble brow, as that angry voice ranted and raved.
The road led past the gardens of more enormous villas. All of them looked quite new. The air was heavy with the scent of roses and newly cut grass. Somewhere someone was frying bacon and the smell made the girls’ stomachs rumble.
They turned a bend in the road and there was Hadsea. The little town was situated at the far end of a beautiful curve of sandy beach. With one accord, they raced along it.
The whole expanse of sea was the color of blue watered silk. Little pink shells studded the gleaming sand, bordered by golden clumps of broom. Lazy spirals of smoke rose from the chimneys of the town and in the distance they could faintly hear voices singing in the church. Lady Fanny had said nothing about going to church, which struck them as unusual. The fact was that Lady Fanny knew both girls to be Catholic and, being Anglican herself, had not known quite what to do with them. Hadsea did not boast a church that catered to such an unfashionable religion.
Soon they were walking along the deserted cobbled streets of the little town. All the shops were closed and shuttered.
“Well, at least we can find out where the post office is,” said Molly. “And then we can post that letter to Mother as soon as we get our allowance, if things look too bad.”
They wandered up one narrow lane and down another until Mary said, “Can that be it?”
Sure enough the sign above the door said clearly HADSEA GENERAL POST OFFICE. There was a small red stamp machine on a pedestal beside the door and on the pavement outside, a squat red pillar-box for posting letters, but there any resemblance to any sort of post office the girls had ever known ended. The window was full of buckets and spades, black sandshoes, jars of candy, balls of string, can openers, a picture of a lady in a diaphanous gown, who was staring disapprovingly at the Pyramids, a pair of whalebone corsets, and damp postcards showing sepia-tinted views of Hadsea.
“Do you think they’ll actually get a letter from here to America?” said Molly, giggling. “Maybe they’ll send it by bearer on a cleft stick.”
Mary was about to reply when both girls suddenly heard the stifled sound of sobbing coming from somewhere at the rear of the building. Now, two well-bred English ladies would have walked on and minded their own business. But not the Maguire sisters.
They found a little passage at the side of the shop and walked along it toward the sound of the sobbing. It was coming from a small kitchen at the back. The girls stopped and looked at one another awkwardly. This was spying on someone’s private grief. They were about to turn away when a rough voice stopped them in their tracks.
“Stop sniveling and hand over the money,” it growled.
Molly threw her scruples to the winds and peered in a small window. A thin, frail, middle-aged woman was sitting at a scrubbed kitchen table with a money box open in front of her.
“I can’t pay you any more,” she was crying. “I’ve hardly got enough to eat.”
“You’ll pay me and you know why,” growled her tormentor.
Molly squeezed her head around to bring him into view. He was a fat, pimply youth about her own age with brown greasy curls pasted to his low forehead. “How would you like the village to know you and your old man wasn’t married? How would you like His Majesty’s post office to know? Throw you out in the street, they would.”
Still crying, the woman drew some notes and silver from the box and slowly laid them out on the table, where they were immediately snatched up. “This all?” he growled. “See you make it more next time or it’ll be the worse for you.”
As they heard him coming to the kitchen door, the Maguire sisters ran along the narrow passage and then stood staring in apparent fascination at the whalebone corsets. The burly youth strode past them.
“Let’s follow him,” hissed Molly.
The youth was keeping up a good pace but not once did he stop and look behind him. They followed him up through the streets, past the railway station, and along a narrow country lane. They kept well behind him, making sure that they only kept him in sight. A faint breeze had sprung up, bringing with it all the summer scents of the fields and the sea. The idyllic landscape made the squat figure in front of them strangely menacing. He at last stopped outside a small brick cottage on a rise, pushed open the door, and went in.
“Now we know where he lives. Back to the post office,” said Molly.
Mary began to feel frightened. “Shouldn’t we go to the police, Molly?” she asked timidly.
“No,” said Molly. “Of course not. He would be arrested and then that poor woman’s story would come out in court and be all over the town newspaper.”
At the post office the woman was still sitting at the table. Molly rapped on the window.
The woman looked up, startled, and then went to the kitchen door. The girls walked around to the back.
Her eyes still red with weeping, the woman introduced herself. “I am Mrs. Pomfret, the postmistress. I am afraid the post office is closed today. But if there is anything you need urgently…”
“We need to talk to you,” said Molly firmly. “I reckon you could do with a little help. You see, we heard—”
Mrs. Pomfret blushed crimson, gasped, and then began to cry. Molly put an arm around the thin, shaking shoulders and drew her into the kitchen. “I’m going to make you a nice cup of tea and you’re going to tell me all about it,” she said firmly. “No one should have to keep that amount of trouble to themselves.”
Glad of something ordinary to do, Mary took over and bustled about the stove preparing the tea. Molly sat down at the table and took Mrs. Pomfret’s hand in her own. “Tell me about it,” she said, her voice warm with sympathy.
Without knowing why she did it, Mrs. Pomfret found herself telling this strange American girl all about her trouble. Mr. Pomfret was dead. He had died of diphtheria two years ago. They both came from another town. Mr. Pomfret had not been free to marry her. His wife was a devout Roman Catholic and divorce was too expensive in any case. They had both decided to move away and start a new life together. Then Billy Barnstable had appeared upon the scene. Somehow he had ferreted out her secret and had started to blackmail her. If she lost her job as postmistress, she would be ruined. Did he live with his father and mother? No. He lodged with old Mr. Wothers who was as deaf as a post.
While the postmistress had been talking, Molly had been looking vaguely around the dark little kitchen. Her eyes alighted on a game rifle lying in one corner.
“Is that yours?” she asked.
Mrs. Pomfret stared. “It was Mister Pomfret’s,” she said sadly. “Used it for shooting rabbits, he did. Not that I know anything about guns.”
“Have you any cartridges?”
“Well now,” said Mrs. Pomfret in surprise. “The things you ask! Yes, dear, there’s a box of them nasty things on the mantelshelf.”
Molly looked at them carefully. “If you would lend me this gun this evening after dark, I think… I just think… I could put an end to your troubles.”
“Here now!” exclaimed the postmistress in alarm. “This isn’t the wild West.”
“Trust me,” said Molly gently. “Just trust me.…”