of cans and the sound of voices in the kitchen,
the place retained an atmosphere of quiet and tranquillity, not of
isolation or desertion, but of that comfortable restfulness which one
recalls as a child, when, having been ill, one is left at home when the
others have gone to school, and remains in a quiet house, watching
contentedly the leisurely cheerful movements of one's mother.

Mrs Hankworth, the mistress of the best farm in the country, was an
enormously stout but very active woman. Her husband, a man half her size
and an excellent farmer, exhibited only one trait of nervousness, and
that on her account. If she went to market without him he was uneasy
until she came back lest something should have happened to her. In all
the fifteen years of their married life they had never slept out of
their own bed, and they had had no honeymoon.

With the contentment of a woman of sound health and of active useful
life, who was fully aware that her good sense and management were as
necessary to the farm, her husband and twelve children, as his own
knowledge of farming, she looked upon this as a just sense of her own
value, as indeed it was, and the reward of the confidence which she so
completely deserved from her husband. She was generous to her poorer
neighbours even when they cheated her. Not taking it very deeply to
heart nor expecting much otherwise, she was yet able to remember that
her lot was an affluent one compared with theirs, and was ready to
excuse even while being perfectly aware of human fraility. Who, when she
had sent to an old woman of the village who lived discontentedly on such
pickings as she could induce her neighbours to leave her, and who had
constantly profited by the liberality of this well-established mistress,
a ticket for a large tea, and was informed by some officious person that
the husband also had procured a ticket at her expense, said, "He's a
poor old crab-stick. It'll do him no harm to have a good tea for once."

She was a contented woman, entirely satisfied with the position which
life had allotted to her, a position in which all her faculties had full
scope, and were to the full appreciated by those with whom she had most
to do, and being of a really kind heart she was a good friend to the
poor. When Anne arrived at the door of the dairy, she found its mistress
seated before a tin pail containing a mass of butter which she was
dividing into prints. With white sleeves and apron, a bucket