One of the most dreaded of these was Mrs. Mullins, a thin, pale, elderly woman who wore her iron-grey hair thrust into a black chenille net at the back of her head and wore a little black shawl over her shoulders, summer and winter alike. She was one of the most common sights of the hamlet, going round the Rise in her pattens, with her door-key dangling from her fingers.

That door-key was looked upon as a bad sign, for she only locked her door when she intended to be away some time. “Where’s she a prowlin’ off to?” one woman would ask another as they rested with their water-buckets at a corner. “God knows, an’ He won’t tell us,” was likely to be the reply. “But, thanks be, she won’t be a goin’ to our place now she’s seen me here.”

She visited every cottage in turn, knocking at the door and asking the correct time, or for the loan of a few matches, or the gift of a pin—anything to make an opening. Some housewives only opened the door a crack, hoping to get rid of her, but she usually managed to cross the threshold, and, once within, would stand just inside the door, twisting her door-key and talking.

She talked no scandal. Had she done so, her visits might have been less unwelcome. She just babbled on, about the weather, or her sons’ last letters, or her pig, or something she had read in the Sunday newspaper. There was a saying in the hamlet: “Standing gossipers stay longest,” and Mrs. Mullins was a standing example of this. “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Mullins?” Laura’s mother would say if she happened herself to be seated. But it was always, “No, oh no, thankee. I mustn’t stop a minute;” but her minutes always mounted up to an hour or more, and at last her unwilling hostess would say, “Excuse me, I must just run round to the well,” or “I’d nearly forgotten that I’d got to fetch a cabbage from the allotment,” and, even then, the chances were that Mrs. Mullins would insist upon accompanying her, talking them both to a standstill every few yards.

Poor Mrs. Mullins! With her children all out in the world, her home must have seemed to her unbearably silent, and, having no resources of her own and a great longing to hear her own voice, she was forced out in search of company. Nobody wanted her, for she had nothing interesting to say, and yet talked too much to allow her listener a fair share of the conversation. She was that worst of all bores, a melancholy bore, and at the sight of her door-key and little black shawl the pleasantest of little gossiping groups would scatter.