And
he dared not speak, dared not try to comfort her. She made no sound, the
muscles of her face no movement; only, those tears kept rolling down.
And, behind his paper, Winton's eyes narrowed and retreated; his face
hardened till the skin seemed tight drawn over the bones, and every inch
of him quivered.
The usual route from the station to Bury Street was "up," and the cab
went by narrow by-streets, town lanes where the misery of the world is
on show, where ill-looking men, draggled and over-driven women, and the
jaunty ghosts of little children in gutters and on doorsteps proclaim,
by every feature of their clay-coloured faces and every movement of
their unfed bodies, the post-datement of the millennium; where the lean
and smutted houses have a look of dissolution indefinitely put off, and
there is no more trace of beauty than in a sewer. Gyp, leaning forward,
looked out, as one does after a long sea voyage; Winton felt her hand
slip into his and squeeze it hard.
That evening after dinner--in the room he had furnished for her mother,
where the satinwood chairs, the little Jacobean bureau, the old brass
candelabra were still much as they had been just on thirty years
ago--she said:
"Dad, I've been thinking. Would you mind if I could make a sort of home
at Mildenham where poor children could come to stay and get good air and
food? There are such thousands of them.
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