en, what do you say to a
doggie,--two doggies?"

The child stared, let himself be lifted on the stranger's knee, and did
his very utmost to stop coughing. But when he had succeeded his quick
panting breaths still shook his tiny frame and Wharton's knee.

"Hm--Give him two months or thereabouts!" thought Wharton. "What a
beastly hole!--one room up, and one down, like the other, only a shade
larger. Damp, insanitary, cold--bad water, bad drainage, I'll be
bound--bad everything. That girl may well try her little best. And I go
making up to that man Boyce! What for? Old spites?--new
spites?--which?--or both!"

Meanwhile his rapid skilful fingers were tearing, pinching, and shaping;
and in a very few minutes there, upon his free knee, stood the most
enticing doggie of pinched paper, a hound in full course, with long ears
and stretching legs.

The child gazed at it with ravishment, put out a weird hand, touched
it, stroked it, and then, as he looked back at Wharton, the most
exquisite smile dawned in his saucer-blue eyes.

"What? did you like it, grasshopper?" cried Wharton, enchanted by the
beauty of the look, his own colour mounting. "Then you shall have
another."

And he twisted and turned his piece of fresh paper, till there, beside
the first, stood a second fairy animal--a greyhound this time, with
arching neck and sharp long nose.

"There's two on 'em at Westall's!" cried the child, hoarsely, clutching
at his treasures in an ecstasy.

Mrs. Hurd, at the other end of the cottage, started as she heard the
name. Marcella noticed it; and with her eager sympathetic look began at
once to talk of Hurd and the works at the Court. She understood they
were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter.
Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases. "Oh! he
didn't have nothing to say against it." Mr. Brown, the steward, seemed
satisfied. All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's
annoyance, plaintive as usual. Wharton, with the boy inside his arm,
turned his head an instant to listen.

Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs.
Jellison's gossip, then shrank from it. He had promised her, she thought
to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the
word of a working man as different from anybody else's.

So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the
stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her