Nora was very outspoken. She waited one day until Celestine was at her early luncheon, and then slipped into Bessie's room.
"She's just drifting along, the poor lamb," she said. "I can't say a word against Mr. Forrest; he's always polite to me. But you mark my words, Mrs. Osborne, they'll be wishing a divorce on her before she knows it."
"You knew this—you knew Mr. McNair, Nora. Why do you think she never hears from him?"
And Nora, wise in the pride of the poor, was ready with an answer.
"What has he got to offer her, against what she's got here?" she asked shrewdly. "If she goes, that's one thing; but if he has to ask her, that's another. If you'd seen what she brought back with her"
Her face winked, she fumbled in the pocket of her black silk apron. "Just rags," she said, "and poor little things she's tried to make herself. If you'd see the way she put in a sleeve!"
"Is she grieving now?"
"I think she cries in her sleep, poor lamb. Her pillows are wet sometimes in the morning."
Bessie's thoughts went back swiftly, to that other morning long ago, when she had found Kay's pillow damp with tears. "But I don't know who or what it's about. Honestly, I don't remember." She could not say that now.
As it happened, Bessie was still there when Tom's box arrived. The top boards were taken off downstairs. And it was placed in Kay's boudoir for her to unpack. Kay was not there when all this happened, and even Bessie did not know it was there.
She was having her hair waved, and after her usual fashion her door stood open. The first she knew that anything was wrong was a sort of wail from Kay's room across. She listened, and then she saw Nora outside with her finger to her lips. Bessie acted immediately, jerked her hair free and ran across to find Kay sitting on the floor beside a queer-looking box, holding a dirty little pillow to her breast, and staring at nothing at all.
