g out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within
high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either to
comfort or decoration.

"When we are more settled I shall work wonders in the way of making the
kitchen habitable," said the young woman to her occasional visitors.
There was an unspoken wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed
as well as unspoken. Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; jointly
with her husband she might have her say, and to a certain extent her way,
in ordering its affairs. But she was not mistress of the kitchen.

On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company with chipped sauce-
boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters, and paid bills, rested a worn and
ragged Bible, on whose front page was the record, in faded ink, of a
baptism dated ninety-four years ago. "Martha Crale" was the name written
on that yellow page. The yellow, wrinkled old dame who hobbled and
muttered about the kitchen, looking like a dead autumn leaf which the
winter winds still pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy. For longer than
anyone could remember she had pattered to and fro between oven and wash-
house and dairy, and out to chicken-run and garden, grumbling and
muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly. Emma Ladbruk, of whose
coming she took as little notice as she would of a bee wandering in at a
window on a summer's day, used at first to watch her with a kind of
frightened curiosity. She was so old and so much a part of the place, it
was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing. Old Shep, the
white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for his time to die, seemed
almost more human than the withered, dried-up old woman. He had been a
riotous, roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was already
a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a blind, breathing carcase,
nothing more, and she still worked with frail energy, still swept and
baked and washed, fetched and carried. If there were something in these
wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think
to herself, what generations of ghost-dogs there must be out on those
hills, that Martha had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last good-
bye word to in that old kitchen. And what memories she must have of
human generations that had passed away in her time. It was difficult for
anyone, let alone a stranger l