le.

'Well, that _is_ a God-forsaken hole!' said Langham, studying it, his
interest roused at last, rather, perhaps, by the Ruysdael-like
melancholy and picturesqueness of the scene than by its human
suggestiveness. 'I could hardly have imagined such a place existed in
southern England. It is more like a bit of Ireland.'

'If it were Ireland it might be to somebody's interest to ferret it
out,' said Robert bitterly. 'But these poor folks are out of the world.
They may be brutalised with impunity. Oh, such a case as I had here last
autumn! A young girl of sixteen or seventeen, who would have been
healthy and happy anywhere else, stricken by the damp and the poison of
the place, dying in six weeks, of complications due to nothing in the
world but preventable cruelty and neglect! It was a sight that burnt
into my mind, once for all, what is meant by a landlord's
responsibility. I tried, of course, to move her, but neither she nor her
parents--elderly folk--had energy enough for a change. They only prayed
to be let alone. I came over the last evening of her life to give her
the communion. "Ah, sir!" said the mother to me--not bitterly--that is
the strange thing, they have so little bitterness--"if Mister 'Enslowe
would jest 'a mended that bit 'o roof of ours last winter, Bessie
needn't have laid in the wet so many nights as she did, and she coughin'
fit to break your heart, for all the things yer could put over 'er."'

Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry a few minutes
before, tremulous with feeling. 'Ah, well,' he said at last with a long
breath, moving away from the parapet of the bridge on which he had been
leaning, 'better be oppressed than oppressor, any day! Now, then, I must
deliver my stores. There's a child here Catherine and I have been doing
our best to pull through typhoid.'

They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading to the hamlet.
Some planks carried them across the ditch, the main sewer of the
community, as Robert pointed out, and they made their way through the
filth surrounding one of the nearest cottages.

A feeble elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow bloodless skin
make him look much older than he actually was, opened the door and
invited them to come in. Robert passed on into an inner room, conducted
thither by a woman who had been sitting working over the fire. Langham
stood irresolute; but the old man's quavering 'kindly take a chair, sir;
you've come a l