Bunner Sisters | Page 7

was fascinated by the thought that he and her sister might constantly be
meeting in total unconsciousness of the link between them. Whenever
she reached this stage in her reflexions she lifted a furtive glance to the
clock, whose loud staccato tick was becoming a part of her inmost
being.
The seed sown by these long hours of meditation germinated at last in
the secret wish to go to market some morning in Evelina's stead. As this
purpose rose to the surface of Ann Eliza's thoughts she shrank back
shyly from its contemplation. A plan so steeped in duplicity had never
before taken shape in her crystalline soul. How was it possible for her
to consider such a step? And, besides, (she did not possess sufficient
logic to mark the downward trend of this "besides"), what excuse could
she make that would not excite her sister's curiosity? From this second
query it was an easy descent to the third: how soon could she manage
to go?
It was Evelina herself, who furnished the necessary pretext by awaking
with a sore throat on the day when she usually went to market. It was a
Saturday, and as they always had their bit of steak on Sunday the
expedition could not be postponed, and it seemed natural that Ann
Eliza, as she tied an old stocking around Evelina's throat, should
announce her intention of stepping round to the butcher's.
"Oh, Ann Eliza, they'll cheat you so," her sister wailed.
Ann Eliza brushed aside the imputation with a smile, and a few minutes
later, having set the room to rights, and cast a last glance at the shop,
she was tying on her bonnet with fumbling haste.

The morning was damp and cold, with a sky full of sulky clouds that
would not make room for the sun, but as yet dropped only an
occasional snow-flake. In the early light the street looked its meanest
and most neglected; but to Ann Eliza, never greatly troubled by any
untidiness for which she was not responsible, it seemed to wear a
singularly friendly aspect.
A few minutes' walk brought her to the market where Evelina made her
purchases, and where, if he had any sense of topographical fitness, Mr.
Ramy must also deal.
Ann Eliza, making her way through the outskirts of potato- barrels and
flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory- aproned butcher
who stood in the background cutting chops.
As she approached him across the tesselation of fish-scales, blood and
saw-dust, he laid aside his cleaver and not unsympathetically asked:
"Sister sick?"
"Oh, not very--jest a cold," she answered, as guiltily as if Evelina's
illness had been feigned. "We want a steak as usual, please--and my
sister said you was to be sure to give me jest as good a cut as if it was
her," she added with child-like candour.
"Oh, that's all right." The butcher picked up his weapon with a grin.
"Your sister knows a cut as well as any of us," he remarked.
In another moment, Ann Eliza reflected, the steak would be cut and
wrapped up, and no choice left her but to turn her disappointed steps
toward home. She was too shy to try to delay the butcher by such
conversational arts as she possessed, but the approach of a deaf old lady
in an antiquated bonnet and mantle gave her her opportunity.
"Wait on her first, please," Ann Eliza whispered. "I ain't in any hurry."
The butcher advanced to his new customer, and Ann Eliza, palpitating
in the back of the shop, saw that the old lady's hesitations between liver
and pork chops were likely to be indefinitely prolonged. They were still

unresolved when she was interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy Irish
girl with a basket on her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary
diversion, and when she had departed the old lady, who was evidently
as intolerant of interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on
returning to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing anew,
with an anxious appeal to the butcher's arbitration, the relative
advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the intrusion
on them of two or three other customers, were of no avail, for Mr.
Ramy was not among those who entered the shop; and at last Ann Eliza,
ashamed of staying longer, reluctantly claimed her steak, and walked
home through the thickening snow.
Even to her simple judgment the vanity of her hopes was plain, and in
the clear light that disappointment turns upon our actions she wondered
how she could have been foolish enough to suppose that, even if Mr.
Ramy DID go to that particular market, he would hit on the same day
and hour as herself.
There followed a colourless