Читать книгу The Blind Man's House. A Quiet Story онлайн

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Lizzie Gayner finished her letter with a sigh and sighed again as she licked it, fastened it up. Alice Fisher, housekeeper to old Mrs. Nutting in St. John's Wood, London, was her only sister. Funny that they should both be widows and both be housekeepers. But then it had run like that all their lives long. Alice was five years younger. They had been always devoted—'never a cross word.' They knew everything about one another. Alice knew Lizzie's one great secret and Lizzie knew about the week Alice had spent with the Commercial Traveller at Bournemouth. Alice's William had been alive, in his second year of his illness it was, and Alice had gone off just because of that. She had been nursing William so arduously that she had to do something, and the Commercial Traveller, who had been after her for months, was what she had done.

She had liked him, too, and told Lizzie that she could gather him up in her arms 'like a bit of laundry.' She had never seen him again, or so Lizzie understood. Anyway, he was married and his wife didn't die as Alice's William had done. Lizzie had felt no moral shock at Alice's adventure. She had been glad for her to have her bit of fun.