Hilary said, ‘I’ve got into the wrong train. It sounds awfully stupid, but if you could tell me where we’re going – I don’t even know that.’
A curious little catch came up in the woman’s throat. She put up her hand to the collar of her coat and pulled at it.
‘Ledlington,’ she said. ‘First stop Ledlington.’ And then, with the catch breaking her voice, ‘Oh, miss, I knew you at once. Thank God he didn’t! And he’ll be back any minute -he’d never have gone -not if he’d recognised you. Oh, miss!’
Hilary felt something between pity and repulsion. She had never seen the woman before. Or had she? She didn’t know. She began to think she had, but she didn’t know where. No, it was nonsense – she didn’t know her, and the poor creature must be mad. She began to wish that the man would come back, because if the woman was really mad she was between her and the corridor -
‘I’m afraid,’ she began in a little polite voice, and at once the woman interrupted her, leaning right forward.
‘Oh, miss, you don’t know me – I saw that the way you looked at me. But I knew you directly you got in, and I’ve been hoping and praying I’d get the chance to speak to you.’
Her black gloved hands were gripping one another, the kid stretched across the knuckles, the finger ends sticking out because they were too long. The fingers inside them twisted, plucked, and strained. Hilary watched them with a sort of horror. It was like watching something with pain.
She said, ‘Please – ’
The woman’s voice went on, urgent, toneless, with the catch, not quite a cough, breaking it.
‘I saw you in the court when the trial was on. You come in with Mrs. Grey, and I asked who you was, and they told me you was her cousin Miss Carew, and then I minded I’d heard speak of you -Miss Hilary Carew.’
The fear went out of Hilary and a cold anger stiffened her. As if it wasn’t enough to live through a nightmare like Geoffrey Grey’s trial, this woman, one of the horrible morbid crowd who had flocked to watch his torture and Marion’s agony – this damned woman, because she had recognised her, thought she had an opportunity to pry, and poke, and ask questions. How dare she?