Page:The Rejuvenation Of Miss Semaphore.pdf/124

 onwards. Suddenly her knees seemed to give way. Advancing towards her, but as yet unconscious of her presence, was old Major Jones, who had just stepped out of a tobacconist's shop, and was smoking a post-*prandial cigar. Prudence darted across the road, turned down a side street, and terrified of meeting someone else who knew her, ran all the way to South Kensington Station.

There was no one in the first-class ladies' waiting-room at London Bridge Station when Prudence arrived with her charge, except an elderly person on guard in a battered black bonnet and a woollen crochet shoulder shawl. It wanted twenty minutes of the time fixed by Mrs. Brown for the meeting, so Prudence, feeling really weak and ill from excitement and lack of food, that for two days she had been unable to taste, gave the female sixpence to hold Augusta, while she partook of a cup of tea in the refreshment room.

As she returned, piercing yells were audible long before she reached the waiting-room, and hastily entering she found her sister purple in the face, and bent backwards like a bow in the arms of the attendant.

Her nurse was jogging her roughly up and