Louise except a suspicion that Mr.
Verrinder had chosen some pseudonym.

"What was his nationality?" she asked. "English?"

"I should say not! He was as Amurrican as a piece of pungkin pie."

Marie Louise felt a little relieved, but still at sea. When Widdicombe
asked what message he should take back her curiosity led her to brave
her fate and know the worst:

"Tell him to come to my house at any time this afternoon--no, not
before five. I have some shopping to do, and the servants to engage."

She did not ask Polly to go with her, and Polly took the hint conveyed
in Marie Louise's remark as they left the dining-room, "I've a little
telephoning to do."

Polly went her way, and Marie Louise made a pretext of telephoning.

Major Widdicombe did not see Jake Nuddle as he went down the steps,
for the reason that Jake saw him first and drew his wife aside. He
wondered what had become of Marie Louise.

Jake and his wife hung about nonplussed for a few minutes, till Marie
Louise came out. She had waited only to make sure that Tom and Polly
got away. When she came down the steps she cast a casual glance at
Jake and her sister, who came toward her eagerly. But she assumed that
they were looking at some one else, for they meant nothing to her
eyes.

She had indeed never seen this sister before. The sister who waddled
toward her was not the sister she had left in Wakefield years before.
That sister was young and lean and a maid. Marriage and hard work and
children had swaddled this sister in bundles of strange flesh and
drawn the face in new lines.

Marie Louise turned her back on her, but heard across her shoulder the
poignant call:

"Mamise!"

That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar cry, and
it reverted the years and altered the scene like a magician's
"Abracadabra!"

Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full brunt of her
sister's charge. The repeated name identified the strange-looking
matron as the girl grown old, and Marie Louise gathered her into her
arms with a fierce homesickness. Her loneliness had found what it
needed. She had kinfolk now, and she sobbed: "Abbie darling! My
darling Abbie!" while Abbie wept: "Mamise! Oh, my poor little
Mamise!"

A cluster of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about, but Jake
Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good to him as he
looked her over, and for the nonce he was content to have the slim,
round fashionable creature enve