ad
not noticed her approach, and she had time to study them unawares. For
the most part they worked in pairs, consulting together, the more
deft-handed arranging the flowers, the less skilful acting as assistant,
and executing her commands. Quietly though they worked, there was in
the air a sense of _camaraderie_; and one divined that these workers
were friends who had chosen to work together, and enjoyed the
companionship. In the background a solitary black-robed figure stood
straining upward from the seat of a pew, engaged in covering the sill of
a window with fragments of foliage, and those inferior flowers which had
been rejected for more prominent places. Grizel took a short cut
through a pew, and approached this worker's side.

"May I help you?" she asked, and Miss Bruce turned her head and stared
in bewilderment. She was a middle-aged spinster, who lived in a small
villa, with a small servant-girl, a fox-terrier, and a canary in a brass
cage. She possessed exactly two hundred pounds a year, and felt herself
rich. It was only in the matter of friends that she was poor, for the
taint of trade set her apart from the people whom she wished to know,
while as a lady of independent means she, in her turn, despised the
class from which she had sprung. Mrs Evans considered Miss Bruce a
"useful" worker, and asked her to tea regularly once a year, in addition
to a summer garden party. The churchwarden's wife was asked to meet her
on these occasions. "You won't mind, dear, I know," the Vicar's wife
would premise. "You _are_ so kind, and it gives her such pleasure, poor
soul!" But as a matter of fact the tea party gave Miss Bruce no
pleasure at all. She was keen enough to realise the exact conditions of
her invitation, and instead of feeling flattered was wounded and
aggrieved... "Last week she had nine people there one afternoon, the
Mallisons and the Escourts, all that set. Ellen heard about it from the
cook. Why couldn't she ask me then?" she would ask herself bitterly.
"Never anyone but Mrs Rose!" Every year she decided to refuse the next
invitation, but when it came to the time her courage failed. In the
deadly dullness of her life a change was too rare to be lightly
foregone. She stepped down from her high perch now, and turned her dull
eyes to stare into Grizel Beverley's happy face.

"May I help you a little?"

"Thank you. It's very kind, I'm sure. I shall be much obliged."

"_That's_ all righ