Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/259

Rh out. He had bought them with a purpose, and now bent his steps down Market Street. At the foot of the hill he paused before a row of whitewashed cottages. A green fence ran along their front, and a pebbled path; and here he found a stout, matronly woman bent over a wash-tub.

"Does Mrs. Best live here?" he asked.

The woman withdrew about a dozen pins from her mouth and answered all in one breath:—

"She isn't called Best any longer; she married agen five year ago; second husbing, he died too; she doesn' live here any more."

With this she stuck the pins very deliberately, one by one, in the bosom of her print gown, and plunged her hands into the wash-tub again.

The Emigrant stood nonplussed for a moment and scratched the back of his head, tilting his soft hat still further forward on his nose.

"She used to be very fond of me when I was a boy," he said lamely.

"Yes?" The tone seemed to ask what business that could be of hers.

"She came as nurse to my mother when I was born. I suppose that made her take a fancy to me."

"Ah, no doubt," replied the woman vaguely, and added, while she soaped a long black stocking, "she did a lot o' that, one time and another."

"She had a little girl of her own before I left Tregarrick," the Emigrant persisted, not because