cottage on the way from market to give her news of a football match or
fair about to be held in the district. Women would send their children
on their way to school to give similar news, and the boy who brought her
the roll of newspapers, which she sold at the station every morning,
would often wheel her barrow for her. She had a large, clumsy chest on
the frame of an old perambulator, in which she wheeled about her store
of aerated waters, toffee, and newspapers. She would place herself at
the gate of the cricket ground on Saturday afternoon. The sliding lid of
her chest made a counter on which she set her scales and her neatly cut
pile of paper for wrapping up the toffee. She had no rivals in the
district, for the most avaricious small shop-keeper would have been
ashamed to confuse or trouble the simple, good, courageous woman.
Perhaps the most complete sign of her triumph over her disability was,
that no one dreamed of calling her "Poor Mary." Like her friend, Anne
Hilton, she was a member of the little wayside chapel, which, with all
that it meant, made a centre of warmth and fellowship for both lonely
women.




CHAPTER VI


So placid and unimpressive was the country which lay about Anne Hilton's
cottage, that in the lanes which branched from it one seldom thought of
any other season than that of spring. Even in winter, when a few
shrivelled berries clattered in the leafless hedges, and the old beech
leaves dangled until the new ones swelled in the stem, one thought of
the beauty of spring, when the hedges would be full of hawthorn, and the