Then I rallied my senses. “But I thought you had trouble about a fortnight ago—your husband, Zebadiah Price—I heard——”
“My Zeb? About a fortnight ago? Let’s see?”—thoughtfully turning her left eye in the direction of the church spire, and thereby tilting her hat askew. “Ah, I expect you mean about last February; to be sure, he did have a touch of this ’ere influenza; and he were a bit queer for a couple of days, he were: but that was nothing to my losing my calf!”
“I’m glad it was no worse,” I said heartily. “Why, Mrs. Jane Price told me she was coming to the funeral.”
“_Jane!_” ejaculated Mrs. Zebadiah. “Jane Price said she was coming to _his_ funeral? Not if I know’d it, and it had been me very own even, she wouldn’t; the _hussy_—begging your pardon, m’m, for using sech a word. She knows better than to try to put so much as a shoenail of her foot inside our door. She never aren’t and she never shan’t. Though for brazenness there ain’t their beat in the county. Why, p’raps you’ve heard how that there Gladys Price has started an ole clothes shop in the town here, right under our very nose, and my husband as respected as he is. There it is for everybody to read over the door—‘G. PRICE. Ladies and Gents’ Hemporium’—whatever that may be! Coming to his funeral, indeed! It makes me _broil_!” And Mrs. Z. went off fairly sizzling with indignation.
When we had duly found (after long search) and surveyed the Roman remains (which consisted of three upright stones, something like those used for kerbstones in the streets, and stood in the middle of a very boggy field), and had failed to decide whether they were the viaduct, the amphitheatre, or the villa, I suggested a speedy return to the station, as it was now coming down a steady drizzle, with indications of still more to follow. But Virginia said—
“I’d like, while we’re here, just to have a look into the hemporium window, to see what she has marked that hat of mine.”
When we reached it, behold, it was like taking a regretful look back into the past, for most of the garments there displayed we had formerly known when they walked our village street in decorous Sunday glory. And they included: a grey cloth coat of mine that had disappeared most mysteriously; a long silk scarf of Ursula’s that, so far, she had never missed; and a bead-bag I had often admired when carried by the lady of the manor, and which, we felt sure, she had never given away.