"She's a-going to her banker's I suppose," he said meditatively; "going to make some new investments perhaps. Women are always a-fidgeting and chopping and changing with their money."
Mrs. Branston kept the cab waiting half an hour, according to the fairest reckoning. She was very particular about her toilette that morning, and inclined to be discontented with the sombre plainness of her widow's garb, and to fancy that the delicate border of white crape round her girlish face made her look pale, not to say sallow. She came downstairs at last, however, looking very graceful and pretty in her trailing mourning robes and fashionable crape bonnet, in which the profoundest depth of woe was made to express itself with a due regard to elegance. She came down to the homely hackney vehicle attended by the obsequious Berners, whose curiosity was naturally excited by this solitary expedition.
"Where shall I tell the man to drive, mum?" the butler asked with the cab-door in his hand.
Mrs. Branston felt herself blushing, and hesitated a little before she replied.
"The Union Bank, Chancery-lane. Tell him to go by the Strand and Temple-bar."
"I can't think what's come to my mistress," Miss Berners remarked as the cab drove off. "Catch _me_ driving in one of those nasty vulgar four-wheel cabs, if I had a couple of carriages and a couple of pairs of horses at my disposal. There's some style about a hansom; but I never could abide those creepy-crawley four-wheelers."
"I admire your taste, Miss Berners; and a dashing young woman like you's a credit to a hansom," replied Mr. Parker gallantly. "But there's no accounting for the vagaries of the female sex; and I fancy somehow Mrs. B. didn't want any of us to know where she was going; she coloured-up so when I asked her for the direction. You may depend there's something up, Jane Berners. She's going to see some poor relation perhaps--Mile-end or Kentish-town way--and was ashamed to give the address."
"I don't believe she has any relations, except old Mother Pallinson and her son," Miss Berners answered.
And thereupon the handmaiden withdrew to her own regions with a discontented air, as one who had been that day cheated out of her legitimate rights.