ink by this evening."

"I was thinking, Miss Betty, that you might borrow a bottle of port wine
at Rose Cottage."

"I don't think I can do that," said Betty decidedly, "you see, Miss
Pendarth's port is very good port, and we could never give her back a
bottle of the same quality."

And then, as Nanna sidled towards the door, the old woman suddenly
remarked, a little irrelevantly:--"I suppose you've told Miss Pendarth
that Mr. Godfrey is coming, Miss Betty?"

Betty looked round quickly. "No," she said, "I haven't had a chance yet.
Thank you for reminding me."

The old woman slipped away, and Betty suddenly wondered whether Nanna had
really come in to ask that question as to Miss Pendarth. Somehow Betty
suspected that she had.

CHAPTER VII

It was about eleven, when most of her household chores were done, that
Betty started off to pay an informal call on Miss Pendarth, in some ways
the most outstanding personality in the village of Beechfield.

"Busybody"--"mischief-maker"--"a very kind lady"--"a disagreeable
woman"--"a fearful snob"--"a true Christian"--were some of the epithets
which had been, and were still, used, to describe the woman to whose
house, Rose Cottage, Betty Tosswill, with a slight feeling of discomfort
bordering on pain, began wending her way.

Olivia Pendarth and her colourless younger sister, Anne, the latter
now long dead, had settled down at Beechfield in the nineties of the
last century. When both over thirty years of age, they had selected
Beechfield as a dwelling-place because of its quiet charm and nearness
to London. Also because Rose Cottage, which, in spite of its unassuming
name, was, if a small yet a substantial, red-brick house with a good
garden, paddock and stables, exactly suited them, as to price, and as to
the accommodation they then wanted. The surviving sister was now rather
over sixty, and her income was very much smaller than it had been, but it
never even occurred to her to try and sell what had become to her a place
of mingled painful and happy memories.

In every civilised country a village is the world in little, though it
is always surprising to the student of human nature to find how many
distinct types are gathered within its narrow bounds. And if this is
true of village communities all over Europe, it is peculiarly true of
an English village.

Miss Pendarth was a clever woman. Too clever to be really happy in the
life to which she had condemned herself.