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He looked preoccupied and worried that night, and while he was as silent as ever, yet his silence had the effect of speech. They sat in their customary places: Mrs. Lynn and Mrs. Biggs in the chairs on the broad step-stone, Sarah and the old woman on the step, and Mr. John Mangam in his chair on the gravel path, when a strange lady came stepping across the hedge from the Ware garden.
"Yes, I see him on the street t'other day," said the old woman, in her thick dialect. She sat straighter than ever as she gazed across at the garden of lilies and the great Ware house, and the cold step-stone seemed to pierce her old spinal column like a rod of steel; but she never flinched. Mrs. Wilford Biggs and Mr. John Mangam said nothing.
Mangam." Hyacinthus stood staring at her. Sarah repeated her announcement. Then Hyacinthus Ware disregarded John Mangam as much as if he had been a post of the white fence that enclosed the Lynn yard. "What does it mean?" he cried. "You have no right to ask," said she, also disregarding John Mangam, who sat perfectly still in his chair. "No right to ask after Sarah, what do you mean?
It was a voice to be ashamed of, full of despair and shame and pride, so wronged and mangled that her very spirit seemed violated. John Mangam said nothing then. She and the man sat there quite still, when Hyacinthus came stepping over the hedge. Sarah found a voice when she saw him. She turned to him. "Good evening, Mr. Ware," she said, clearly. "I would like to announce my engagement to Mr.
Before anything further could be said John Mangam rose, and walked rapidly down the gravel walk out of the yard and down the street. Sarah felt dizzy. She bent lower as she sat and held her head in her two hands, and the strange lady came on the other side of her, and she was enveloped in a fragrance of some foreign perfume.
"Well, be you goin' to set there all night?" she asked, rather sharply, of Sarah. It had seemed to her that Sarah might have made a little effort to entertain Mr. John Mangam. "No. I am coming in, mother," Sarah said. Sarah spoke differently from the others. She had had, as they expressed it in Adams, "advantages." She had, in fact, graduated from a girls' school of considerable repute.
"I should think he must be lonesome, poor man, with only that no-account housekeeper to home," said the old woman, as she also rose, with pain, of which she resolutely gave no evidence. Her poor old joints seemed to stab her, but she fought off the pain angrily. Instead she pitied with meaning John Mangam. "It must be pretty hard for him," assented Mrs. Lynn.
She also thought it would be a very good thing for her daughter to marry John Mangam. Sarah said nothing. The old woman, after saying, like the others, that she guessed she must be goin', crept off alone across the field to her little house. She would have resented any offer to accompany her, and Mrs. Lynn arose to enter the house.
"I mean just what I say," said Sarah, firmly. "I want to know. John Mangam has been coming here steadily for nearly two years, and he never even says a word, much less asks me to marry him. Does he expect me to do it?" "I suppose he thinks you might at least meet him half-way," said her mother, confusedly. That afternoon she went over to Mrs.
She looked straight at Mr. John Mangam as she spoke. "I don't call him good-looking at all," said the old woman; "dreadful white-livered." Sarah said nothing at all, but the face of the man, Hyacinthus Ware, was before her eyes still, as beautiful and grand as the face of a god. "Never heerd such a name, either," said the old woman. "His mother was dreadful flowery. She had some outlandish blood.
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