elatives as attended to their natural
duty. Her presence in the cottage, and her interest in Mrs. Welden's
ready flow of simple talk, were desirable and proper compliments to the
old woman herself. She was a decent and self-respecting old person, but
in her mind there was no faintest glimmer of resentment of questions
concerning rent and food and the needs of her simple, hard-driven
existence. She had answered such questions on many occasions, when they
had not been asked in the manner in which her ladyship's sister asked
them. Mrs. Brent had scolded her and "poked about" her cottage, going
into her tiny "wash 'us," and up into her infinitesimal bedroom under
the slanting roof, to see that they were kept clean. Miss Vanderpoel
showed no disposition to "poke." She sat and listened, and made an
inquiry here and there, in a nice voice and with a smile in her
eyes. There was some pleasure in relating the whole history of your
eighty-three years to a young lady who listened as if she wanted to hear
it. So old Mrs. Welden prattled on. About her good days, when she was
young, and was kitchenmaid at the parsonage in a village twenty miles
away; about her marriage with a young farm labourer; about his "steady"
habits, and the comfort they had together, in spite of the yearly
arrival of a new baby, and the crowding of the bit of a cottage his
master allowed them. Ten of 'em, and it had been "up before sunrise, and
a good bit of hard work to keep them all fed and clean." But she had not
minded that until Jack died quite sudden after a sunstroke. It was odd
how much colour her rustic phraseology held. She made Betty see it all.
The apparent natural inevitableness of their being turned out of the
cottage, because another man must have it; the years during which
she worked her way while the ten were growing up, having measles, and
chicken pox, and scarlet fever, one dying here and there, dropping out
quite in the natural order of things, and being buried by the parish in
corners of the ancient church yard. Three of them "was took" by scarlet
fever, then one of a "decline," then one or two by other illnesses. Only
four reached man and womanhood. One had gone to Australia, but he never
was one to write, and after a year or two, Betty gathered, he had seemed
to melt away into the great distance. Two girls had married, and Mrs.
Welden could not say they had been "comf'able." They could barely feed
themselves and their swarms of children. T