Emma, now on her steps, turned at the last words, and it seemed to her tormentor that her smile deepened. That was all the answer she made, however—if it could be called an answer. Even as Martha Jane watched, she began to fade, dwindling and gleaming and glooming, until at last she was out of sight. PART II THANK-OFFERING CHAPTER I By the time the Chorus had talked itself to rags and a dribbling finish, and Mrs. James had remembered her pudding and Mrs. Airey her hot irons; and Mrs. Clapham had had time to think of her knee, and how she was tired with standing, and how it would be just as easy to enjoy the news sitting down—both Emma and Martha Jane had vanished utterly from the scene. It was the charwoman who noticed their disappearance first, wiping away the last glad tears from her shining, glorified face. “Eh, now, if Martha Jane hasn’t made off, and I never thought on to say I was sorry she’d lost! I was that taken up wi’ t’ letter I couldn’t think of nowt else. She’ll be feeling bad about it, I reckon, will poor Martha Jane. I wish I’d had a word wi’ her before she slipped away!” “I shouldn’t worry myself.... Likely she’ll go whingeing to yon lordship of hers, and get summat instead!” Mrs. James looked back from between her pillars, anxious, in spite of her pudding, for a last slap at Martha Jane. “Anyway, I was right about Mr. Baines bringing the news,” she went on proudly; “or next best thing to Mr. Baines! A bonny little thing, that little girl, isn’t she now?—and that like him an’ all!... Ay, well, Mrs. Clapham, I’m main glad it come out right, and there’s a deal more I’d like to know if it wasn’t for yon pan....” “Eh, and yon irons o’ mine’ll be fit to scorch!” ... Mrs. Airey bestirred herself also at the departure of Mrs. James. “I’m as throng as I can be to-day, an’ all. Folks is that put about if they don’t get their washing on the tick, you’d think they’d only a shirt and a pillow-slip to their names!... Step along in with her, Maggie, and get her a cup o’ tea,” she added to Mrs. Tanner, as she and her sister moved away. “She’s a bit upset wi’ it all, and a cup o’ tea’ll pull her together. Folks is easy put out about good news—I cried a deal more when my Teddy come back from t’ War than I ever did when he went—even if they don’t all get strokes and suchlike just by clapping an eye on poor Baines!” There was a last burst of laughter in the street at that, the last that it was to hear that morning, the last, perhaps, that it was to hear that day.... “Ay, Emma was right creepy with her nasty tales!” Mrs. Clapham concluded meditatively, when the sisters had gone. “(I can manage right enough, Maggie. Don’t you put yourself out!) She’s cleared off again, I notice, and with never a word. She must just ha’ waited to hear the news, and then made back.”