and power. An impassible common sense had come to life in the sealed house. She was tidy, too; no trace on her of a disturbed night and morning, and she was even wearing a clean apron. No wearisome lamentation about the shop having to be closed! Elsie had instinctively put the shop into its place of complete unimportance.

As they passed the shut door of the principal bedroom the doctor, raising his eyebrows, gave an inquiring jerk.

“I did knock, sir. There was no answer, so I took the liberty of looking in. He seemed to be asleep.”

“You’re sure he was asleep?”

“Well, sir,” said Elsie, stolidly and yet startlingly, “he wasn’t dead. I’ll say that.”

They passed to the second floor. There lay the mistress on the servant’s narrow bed, covered with Elsie’s half-holiday garments on the top of the bedclothes. That Violet was extremely ill and in pain was obvious from the colours of her complexion and the sharp, defeated, appealing expression on her face. The doctor saw Elsie smile at her; it was a smile beaming out help and pure benevolence, and it actually brought some sort of a transient smiling response into the tragic features of the patient; it was one of the most wonderful things that the doctor had ever seen. Nobody could have guessed that only thirty-six hours before Elsie had been a thief convicted of stealing and eating raw bacon. And, indeed, the memory of the deplorable episode was erased as completely from Elsie’s mind as from her mistress’s.

“I shall take you to the hospital at once, Mrs. Earlforward,” the doctor said in his prim, gentle tone, after the briefest examination. He added rather abruptly: “I’ve got a taxi waiting. I think you’ve borne up marvellously.” In a few moments he had changed his plans to meet the new developments, and he was now wondering whether he might not have difficulty in securing a bed for Mrs. Earlforward.

“I shall see properly to master, ’m,” Elsie put in. “I mean if he doesn’t go to the hospital himself.”

Violet nodded acquiescence. She did not want to waste her strength in speech, or she might have told them of Henry’s promise to her to go into hospital. Moreover she was suffering too acutely to feel any strong interest in either Henry or anybody else.

“We’ll carry you to the cab,” said the doctor, and to Elsie: “She must be dressed, somehow⁠—doesn’t matter how.”

Violet murmured:

“I’d sooner walk to the cab, doctor, if you know what I mean. I can.”

“Well, if you can⁠—” he concurred in order not to upset her.

When the summary dressing was done, Elsie having made two journeys to her employer’s bedroom to fetch garments and hat, the doctor said to her confidentially:

“We shall want some money. Have you any? Where is the money kept?”

Experience had taught him never to disburse money for patients; and he had a very clear vision of the threepences ticking up outside in King’s Cross Road.

“My purse. On chest of drawers,” whispered Violet, who had heard.

Elsie made a third journey to the state-bedroom. Oblivious of the proprieties, she had not knocked before, and she did not knock now. On the previous occasion Mr. Earlforward had merely watched her with apparently dazed, indifferent eyes. But the instant she picked up the purse from the chest of drawers he exclaimed:

“Here! Where are you going with that purse?”

“Missis sent me for it,” Elsie replied.

From prudence she would give him no more news than that of the situation. No knowing what he might attempt to do if he was fully apprised!

Violet was carried downstairs and through the shop, and at the shop door she was set on her insecure feet, and Dr. Raste held her while Elsie unbolted. And she managed to walk, under the curious glances of a few assembled quidnuncs, along the steps to the taxi, Dr. Raste on one side of her and Elsie on the other. She had foretold that the moment the doctor ordered her to the hospital she would go to the hospital. She had foretold true. She was gone. The taxi made a whir and moved. She was gone.

“I’ll call this afternoon!” the doctor shouted from the departing vehicle.

In the shop again, the encouraging smile with which she had speeded her mistress still not yet expired from her round, fat face, Elsie picked up the milk-can. The letters on the floor were disdained. She thought of her presentiment of the previous evening but one: “This will be the last time I shall ever wheel in the bookstand.” And she had a firm conviction that in that presentiment she had by some magical power seen acutely into the future.

Part V

I

The Promise

Elsie was forgetting to fasten the shop door. With a little start at her own negligence she secured both the bolt and the lock. She thought suddenly of the days⁠—only a year away, yet far, far off in the deceiving distances of time⁠—when Mr. Earlforward and she had the place to themselves. Mrs. Earlforward had come, and Mrs. Earlforward had gone, and now Elsie had sole charge⁠—had far more responsibility and more power than ever before. The strangeness of quite simple events awed her. Nor did the chill of the thin brass handle of the milk-can in her hand protect her against the mysterious spell of the enigma of life.

She “knew” that the shop would never open again as T. T. Riceyman’s. She “knew” that either Mr. or Mrs. Earlforward would die, and perhaps both; and she was very sad because she felt sorry for them, not because she felt sorry for herself. In the days previous to the amazing advent of Mrs. Earlforward Elsie had had Joe. Joe was definitely vanished from her existence. Nothing else in her own existence greatly mattered to her. She would probably lose a good situation; but she was well aware, beneath her diffidence and modesty, that by virtue of the knowledge which she had

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