Miss Pendarth's appearance, as is so often the case with an elderly,
unmarried Englishwoman of her class, gave no clue to her clever,
decisive, and original character. She had a thin, rather long mouth, what
old-fashioned people call a good nose, and grey eyes, and she had kept
the slight, rather stiff, figure of her girlhood. She still wore her
hair, which was only now beginning to turn really grey, braided in the
way which had been becoming to her thirty years before. The effect, if
neat, was rather wig-like, and the one peculiar-looking thing about her
appearance. She always wore, summer and winter, a mannish-looking
tailor-made coat and skirt, and a plainly cut flannel or linen shirt. At
night--and she dressed each evening--she alternated between two black
dresses, the one a velvet dress gown, the other a sequin-covered satin
tea-gown.
Such was the woman to whom Betty Tosswill had thought it just as well to
go herself with the news of Godfrey Radmore's coming visit to Old Place,
and as she walked slowly up the village street, the girl tried to remind
herself that Miss Pendarth had a very kind side to her nature. Of all the
letters Betty had received at the time of her brother's death, she had
had none of more sincerely expressed sympathy than that from this old
friend whom she was now going to see.
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