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governess in some genteel household.
    ‘I am sure you are most kind,’ I said, somewhat stiffly, ‘but I assure you I am not in want of any material aid, nor can I imagine any circumstance which would make me so.’
    ‘Aye, I’m sure you can’t, m’dear, but then you haven’t seen as much of life or of India as I have. Now’—and she dismissed the matter of Emily from her mind—‘I have something I want to show you, just so that you don’t think my promise of help is another polite nothing. I have a little hoard of my own, which I can do with as I please without taking the bread out of my family’s mouth. Be sure the door is shut fast, Ellie!’
    Elvira turned the key in the lock, and stood with her back to the door and her arms crossed over her flat bosom, like a soldier on guard.
    Mrs Wilkins lowered her voice to a whisper.
    ‘I have a fortune in my garter,’ she breathed.
    For a moment I wondered whether her protracted suffering from sea-sickness had unhinged her mind, and could only look on in silence as she began to draw up her purple skirts until she had exposed to my view one stout leg clothed in a white cotton stocking and fastened just below the knee by a wide black garter.
    She unclasped this band and held it out for my inspection.
    ‘Go on, look at it!’ she urged.
    I examined the garter. It was made of black satin bordered with lace, and was unexceptional enough. I surmised that Elvira had embroidered her mama’s initials on it, and turning it over discovered the inside was quilted with the same pink silk used in the monogram.
    ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s it,’ chuckled Mrs Wilkins. ‘On the inside.’
    I ran my finger round the quilting, and, as I was beginning to suspect, my touch discovered a series of hard lumps, and on a closer inspection found that some of these were large enough to be visible to the eye. I handed the thing back, unable to repress a smile at Mrs Wilkins’s patent triumph.
    ‘Eighteen pearls in there,’ she whispered as she refastened the garter below her knee. ‘And four diamonds; an emerald like a pigeon’s egg, and seven fine rubies! A small fortune for anyone, and a big one for me! My husband took ’em off a dead man on a battlefield—sewn all over his jacket they was, and the emerald in his turban. Oh, no! Don’t look like that’—as I shrank back—‘it all happened so long ago, before we was even married in fact, when the Regiment was fighting in one of the states, it was. You’ve no need to worry about the man who wore ’em. He was quite dead. There used to be two more pearls, but one I sold to get passage money when my first baby died, and one to get weddin’ clothes for my Ellie, but the marriage never did happen.’
    ‘I am so sorry,’ I said to Elvira.
    ‘Yes, tragic it was!’ continued her mother with the complacent enjoyment that the mention of disaster produces in certain women. ‘A beautiful man ’e was too! Charlie was his name, with a flowing golden beard almost down to his waist. ’E died!’
    ‘Shot?’ I hazarded politely, my mind still wandering on jewel-strewn battlefields.
    ‘Cholera!’ volunteered Elvira in a subdued voice.
    ‘Yes! Dead as mutton six hours after ’e took it! But don’t mind that now. What I want you to remember is this, dearie, that if ever you are in trouble or want for anything that money can buy, you have only to write to Gwendoline Wilkins! There’s not many as would have done as much as you have for as little cause, Miss Hewitt. Well do I remember that port-wine jelly that you made for us down in the hot galley when the whole ship was bucking like a bee-stung horse. Settled a treat on my stomach did that jelly, even if it was a mite too wet, the first thing in days that did, and only due to your goodness. Now that’s not the sort of thing that can be repaid with money, not any amount of money, but things being as they are, us coming out of different boxes like, my little nest egg is all that we