Page:Delight - de la Roche - 1926.djvu/153

 glared around the twilit room, as though she half expected to find Bastien hidden there.

Delight took her coat and hat from the peg and put them on, avoiding Mrs. Jessop's eyes.

"What about my box and basket?" she asked.

"You take one end of the trunk. It ain't very heavy, and I'll take the other. You can carry the basket in your other hand. You're big enough, ain't you?"

Together they carried the trunk down the steep black stairway. Delight was in front, the basket bumping against her leg, the trunk weighing on her cruelly. "Oh," she thought, "what a fix I'm in! What if Mrs. Jessop should let go of her end of the trunk and I'd go to the bottom with it on me! I'd be smashed. Perhaps she's planned the whole thing, to kill me." She felt like screaming.

But they reached the kitchen safely.

The fire was lighted. A pot of tea was stewing on the back of the stove. They set down the trunk and faced each other, panting. Mrs. Jessop looked ghastly in the electric light, black circles beneath her eyes, her lips blue. She said commandingly:

"Sit down at the table. Here's your month's wage." She handed her some bills. "Count it. Now, will you have a fried egg?"

"No, just a cup of tea and a bit of bread."

"It's for you to say. I'll cook you the egg if you want it."

"No. No. I don't want any egg." It was strange to sit alone at the long table, being waited on by Mrs. Jessop. The bread and butter stuck in her throat till she washed it down with strong tea. The strange thing was, she seemed to see Queenie marching up and down the kitchen singing her marching song: