saying much as he sat at his bench, for he had
been brought up to the shoemaking and was very respected among
Pevensey folks. He would hum a hymn or two at his work sometimes,
but he was never a man of words. When young Barber went back to
London, Ellen, she began to lose her pretty looks. I had never
thought much of young Barber. There was something common about
him--not like the labouring men, but a kind of town commonness,
which is twenty times worse to my thinking; and if I didn't like him
before, you may guess I didn't waste much love on him when I see
poor Ellen's looks.

Now, if I am to tell you this story at all, I must tell it very
steady and quiet, and not run on about what I thought or what I
felt, or I shan't never have the heart to go through it. The long
and short of it was that a month hadn't passed over our heads after
young Barber leaving, when one morning our Ellen wasn't there. And
she left a note, nailed to father's bench, to say she had gone off
with her true love, and father wasn't to mind, for she was going to
be married.

Father, he didn't say a word, but he turned a dreadful white, and
blue his lips were, and for one dreadful moment I thought that I had
lost him too. But he come round presently. I ran across to the Three
Swans to get a drop of brandy for him; and I looked at her letter
again, and I looked at him, and we both see that neither of us
believed that she was going to be married. There was something about
the very way of the words as she had written them which showed they
weren't true.

Father, he said nothing, only when next Sunday had come, and I had
laid out his Sunday things and his hat, all brushed as usual, he
says--

'Put 'em away, my girl. I don't believe in Sunday. How can I believe
in all that, and my Ellen gone to shame?'

And, after that, Sundays was the same to him as weekdays, and the
folks looked shy at us, and I think they thought that, what with
Ellen's running away and father's working on Sundays, we was on the
high-road to the pit of destruction.

And so the time went on, and it was Christmas. The bells was ringing
for Christmas Eve, and I says to father: 'O father! come to church.
Happen it's all true, and Ellen's an honest woman, after all.'

And he lifted his head and looked at me, and at that moment there
come a soft little knock at the door. I knew who it was afore I had
time to stir a foot to go across the kitchen and open the door to
her. She blink