"Not that, sweetheart. If you have luck like most of us, perhaps
you'll have enough fighting in your life without making it your trade
to fight. But you don't understand me yet, Willie, darling?"

The little one's father entered the room at this moment, and the
opening of the door brought the sound of jumbled voices from a distant
apartment. The noisy party of Royalists apparently belonged to the
number of those who hold that a man's manners in an inn may properly
be the reverse of what they are expected to be at home. The louder
such roysterers talk, the more they rap out oaths, the oftener they
bellow for the waiters and slap them on the back, the better they
think they are welcome in a house of public entertainment.

Amidst the tumult that came from a remote part of the inn a door was
heard to open, and a voice was distinguishable above the rest calling
lustily for the landlord.

"I must go off to them," said that worthy. "They expect me to stand
host as well as landlord, and sit with them at their drinking."

When the door closed again, Sim lifted the boy on to his knee, and
looked at him with eyes full of tenderness. The little fellow returned
his gaze with a bewildered expression that seemed to ask a hundred
silent questions of poor Sim's wrinkled cheeks and long, gray,
straggling hair.

"I mind me when my own lass was no bigger nor this," said Sim.

Ralph did not answer, but turned his head aside and listened.

"She was her mammy's darling, too, she was."

Sim's voice was thick in his throat.

"And mine as well," he added. "We used to say to her, laughing and
teasing like, 'Who will ye marry, Rotie?'--we called her Rotie
then,--'who will ye marry, Rotie, when ye grow up to be a big, big
woman?' 'My father,' she would say, and throw her little arms about my
neck and kiss me."

Sim raised his hard fingers to his forehead to cover his eyes.

Ralph still sat silent, his head aside, looking into the fire.

"That's many and many a year agone; leastways, so it seems. My wife
was living then. We were married in Gaskarth, but work was bad, and we
packed up and went to live for a while in a great city, leagues and
leagues to the south. And there my poor girl, Josephine--I called her
Josie for short, and because it was more kind and close like--there my
poor girl fell ill and died. Her face got paler day by day, but she
kept a brave heart--she was just such like as Rotha that way--and she
tended the house