Chapter III

It is by the ages of these four they can most easily and comprehensively be classified; yet the age of one at least of them was never known, or ever asked in Bridnorth.

Hannah might have been forty or more. She might well have been less. But the hair was gray on her head and she took no pains to conceal it. Hers, if any, was the contented soul in that household. With her it was not so much that she had given up the hope that every woman has, as that before she knew what life might be, that hope had passed her by. She was as one who stands in a crowd to see the runners pass and, before even she has raised herself on tiptoe to catch a glimpse above the heads around her, is told that the race is over.

This was Hannah, busying her life with the household needs and, for interest, before all reward, teaching the little children of friends in Bridnorth and the neighborhood, teaching them their lessons every morning; every morning kissing them when they came, every morning kissing them when they left.

To her, the arrival of the coach was significant no more than in the unaccustomed passage and hurry of life it brought. To her it was a noise in a silent street. She came to the windows as a child would come to see a circus go by. She watched its passengers descend outside the Royal George with the same light of childish interest in her eyes. Nothing of what those passengers were or what they meant reached the communicating functions of her mind. They were no more than mere performers in the circus ring. What their lives were behind that flapping canvas of the tent, which is the veil concealing the lives of all of us, she did not trouble to ask herself. Like the circus performers, they would be here to-day and to-morrow their goods and chattels would be packed, the naphtha flares beneath whose light they had for a moment appeared would be extinguished. Only the bare ring over which their horses had pranced would remain in Hannah's mind to show where they had been. And in Hannah's mind the grass would soon grow again to blot it out of sight.

To Hannah Throgmorton, these advents and excursions were no more than this.