ing. What I want to do there will wait quite well
till the afternoon."

Miss Forsyth accompanied her visitor into the hall -- the
old eighteenth-century hall which was so exquisitely
proportioned, but the walls of which were covered
with the monstrously ugly mid-Victorian marble paper
she much disliked, but never felt she could afford to
change as long as it still looked so irritatingly "good"
and clean. She opened the front door on to the empty,
darkened street; and then, to Mrs. Otway's great surprise,
she suddenly bent forward and kissed her
warmly.

"Well, my dear," she exclaimed, "I'm glad to have
seen you even for a moment, and I hope your business,
whatever it be, will be successful. I want to tell you
something, here and now, which I've never said to
you yet, long as we've known one another!"

"Yes, Miss Forsyth?" Mrs. Otway looked up surprised --
perhaps a little apprehensive as to what was
coming.

"I want to tell you, Mary, that to my mind you
belong to the very small number of people, of my
acquaintance at any rate, who shall see God."

Mrs. Otway was startled and touched by the other's
words, and yet, "I don't quite know what you mean?"
she faltered -- and she really didn't.

"Don't you?" said Miss Forsyth drily. "Well, I
think Mrs. Purlock, and a good many other unhappy
women in Witanbury, could tell you."

Late in the next afternoon, after leaving the little
luggage she had brought with her at the old-fashioned
lodgings where she found that Miss Forsyth had made

[[215]]

p214 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p215w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p216

v?