As is always the way with your active, intelligent philanthropist, she
was much given to vicarious deeds of charity. At the same time she never
spared herself. Her own comfortable house always contained one or more
of the odd-come-shorts whom she had not managed to place out in good
situations.

Again a wave of resentment swept over Mrs. Otway. This was really too
much!

"How would such a woman as you describe--a cook who has been in a good
London place, and who has lost her health--work into our--mine and
Rose's--ways? Why, we should both be afraid of such a woman! She would
impose on us at every turn. If you only knew, dear Miss Forsyth, how
often, in the last twenty years, I have thanked God--I say it in all
reverence--for having sent me my good old Anna! Think what it has been
to me"--she spoke with a good deal of emotion--"to have in my tiny
household a woman so absolutely trustworthy that I could always go away
and leave my child with her, happy in the knowledge that Rose was as
safe with Anna as she was with me----"

Her voice broke, a lump came into her throat, but she hurried on: "Don't
think that it has all been perfect--that I have lain entirely on a bed
of roses! Anna has been very tiresome sometimes; and, as you know, her
daughter, to whom I was really attached, and whom I regarded more or
less as Rose's foster-sister, made that unfortunate marriage to a
worthless London tradesman. That's the black spot in Anna's life--I
don't mind telling you that it's been a blacker spot in mine than I've
ever cared to admit, even to myself. The man's always getting into
scrapes, and having to be got out of them! Why, _you_ once helped me
about him, didn't you? and since then James Hayley actually had to go to
the police about the man."

"Mr. Hayley will be busier than ever now."

"Yes, I suppose he will."

And then the two ladies, looking at one another, smiled one of those
funny little smiles which may mean a great deal, or nothing at all.

James Hayley, the son of one of Mrs. Otway's first cousins, was in the
Foreign Office; and if he had an inordinate opinion of himself and of
his value to his country, he was still a very good, steady fellow.
Lately he had fallen into the way of coming down to Witanbury
exceedingly often; but when doing so he did not stay with the Otways, in
their pretty house in the Close, as would have been natural and as would
also naturally have made his visits rather less frequent; instea