Page:Edgar Jepson--the four philanthropists.djvu/84

78 and as she told me of those she had experienced, I learned a good deal of her three months in London: how she had moved from an hotel to dear lodgings, from dear lodgings to cheap, from cheap to cheaper, all the while pawning her trinkets and then her mother's jewelry, until she had come to the end of everything in the Harleyford Boad. She had, of course, been swindled everywhere. I gathered, too, that she had suffered bitterly from the strangeness of the life after her country upbringing, and from her loneliness, how she had been oppressed by a growing terror, and at last by utter despair. She did not, of course, make an appeal to my pity by telling me these things in so many words ; but now her tone, now her look and now a phrase told me clearly enough the story of an agony. I felt that there were few, and likely to be few, actions in my life which I should remember with greater pleasure than helping knock Albert Amsted Pudleigh on the head.

I think I showed her plainly my sympathy and indignation. But she cut me short in the expression of my strong desire to wring her Vauxhall landlady's neck by saying: "But how did you know that I was Angel Pavis?"

"I am a barrister as well as a philanthropist. And I gave an opinion on your case against Pudleigh in the matter of the Quorley Granite Company."