thin their folds, were always forthcoming
to protect the orphan girl from wintry winds.

It was no day for flannel when Loveday knocked--with the timidity that
always assailed her, to her own annoyance, when she was about to see her
godmother--on the back door of the Vicarage. She heard her own voice,
robbed of its warm eagerness, asking of the stout cook whether Mrs.
Veale could see her for a minute. The cook sent the housemaid to the
Vicar's lady with the request, and Loveday stood in the large, sunny
kitchen smelling the strange rich foods preparing for the four o'clock
dinner. There was butcher's meat, she could smell that (she had tasted
it at the harvest feast at Upper Farm, where it was provided for the
labourers once a year), and there was a sweet pudding that she could see
stirred together in a big white bowl, a pudding that smelt of sweetness
like a posy. A noisy fly, the first of his kind, buzzed over the plate
where the empty eggshells lay beside the bowl, and from them crawled to
the scattered sugar that sparkled carelessly upon the rim. Loveday, of
old, would have had a second's envy of the fly that could thus browse on
what smelt so good; now the fine aromas affected her nostrils merely as
incense might have those of her papist father--as the savour of the
great house where dwelt those to be propitiated. For upon Mrs. Veale she
now felt hope was fastened; it was from her almost sacred hands that
salvation would flow. Fear and expectation took Loveday by the throat,
so stifling her that the wide kitchen, the stout blue-print-clad cook,
the bright pots and pans, the leaping flames, the savoury odours and the
buzzing of the fly, all blended together before her dizzied eyes.

The figure of the housemaid, crisp in white and black, entered
steadyingly, and with her voice, saying that the mistress would see
Loveday Strick in the morning-room, the flow of the kitchen ebbed and
subsided. Loveday followed the white and black through the long, narrow
hall, where the fox's mask grinned at her from above the fanlight of the
door, to the presence of the Vicar's wife.

Mrs. Veale was a personable lady, with a high and narrow brow, and a
penetrating eye that few in the village could evade if they had aught
upon their conscience. It was said, indeed, that she was better than
a curate to her husband, for she could pass where a man could not
in delicacy have gone, and few were the maids, and fewer still the
housewives, wh