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I can't show you in, you know, without asking him first." The young footman was, indeed, curious to know what Mrs. Holl's object could be in wishing to see his master. Evan had resisted all his attempts to find out, simply saying that it was a private affair of his mother's. "Will you say to him," Mrs.
The second of his two sons, Lily's father, had then left the business established by the brothers at Hanbridge in order to manage, for a time, the parent business in St. Luke's Square. Alderman Holl's death had delayed Lily's marriage. Lily took tea with Constance, or at any rate paid a call, four or five times a week. She listened to Constance.
Presently Daniel Povey and Dick went to the top of the Square with the machine, opposite Holl's, and Dick, being carefully installed in the saddle, essayed to descend the gentle paven slopes of the Square. He failed time after time; the machine had an astonishing way of turning round, running uphill, and then lying calmly on its side.
Holl's house, to the great amazement of the neighbourhood for such an occurrence had not been known in the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the street, and quite a crowd of children collected to witness the delivery of a square heavy box of considerable weight at the door.
"Run and fetch the butler and the cook, and then go for the doctor as quick as you can run; he has got a stroke." The butler was first upon the scene. Mrs. Holl had already lifted Captain Bayley into a sitting position. "I have taken off his necktie and opened his collar," she said. The butler, who was unaware of Mrs. Holl's presence there, was astonished at the scene.
She said she only knew what Sophia had told her. After a time Dr. Stirling determined to try electricity, and Dick Povey drove him up to the surgery to fetch his apparatus. The women were left alone again. Constance was very deeply impressed by Lily Holl's sensible, sympathetic attitude. "Whatever I should have done without Miss Lily I don't know!" she used to exclaim afterwards.
"Holl's my name, and you don't suppose I am going to drop the name of the father and mother who brought me up, and have tended me all these years, for Bayley or any other name; besides, even if it should turn out that I am remotely connected with the family, there is no reason why my name should be Bayley, for, of course, if my mother had been a Bayley, she would have changed her name when she married."
Holl's message to him; then he remembered that it was Frank who had introduced her son to help in the house, and he wondered whether her errand could have any connection with him. "Well, show her up, James," he said; "but just tell her that my time is precious, and that I don't want to listen to long rambling stories, so whatever she has got to say, let her say it straight out."
To Sophia, though she was in a mood which usually stimulates the sense of the romantic, there was nothing of romance in this picturesque tented field. It was just the market. Holl's, the leading grocer's, was already open, at the extremity of the Square, and a boy apprentice was sweeping the pavement in front of it. The public-houses were open, several of them specializing in hot rum at 5.30 a.m.
She could remember a winter morning when from the window she had watched the Square under virgin snow in the lamplight, and the Square had been vast, and the first wayfarer, crossing it diagonally and leaving behind him the irregular impress of his feet, had appeared to travel for hours over an interminable white waste before vanishing past Holl's shop in the direction of the Town Hall.
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