your hand, and I'll lead you. That's it. Just sit down
here, and I'll pull off your boots. I don't want to wake him."

"Who?"

"Father. He'd make a row, perhaps."

She pulled off his boots. "Now," she whispered, "take hold of
me--never mind your weight. Now--first stair, second stair--"

"But--are we out in our old house by Marygreen?" asked the stupefied
Jude. "I haven't been inside it for years till now! Hey? And where
are my books? That's what I want to know?"

"We are at my house, dear, where there's nobody to spy out how ill
you are. Now--third stair, fourth stair--that's it. Now we shall
get on."

VII

Arabella was preparing breakfast in the downstairs back room of this
small, recently hired tenement of her father's. She put her head
into the little pork-shop in front, and told Mr. Donn it was ready.
Donn, endeavouring to look like a master pork-butcher, in a greasy
blue blouse, and with a strap round his waist from which a steel
dangled, came in promptly.

"You must mind the shop this morning," he said casually. "I've to
go and get some inwards and half a pig from Lumsdon, and to call
elsewhere. If you live here you must put your shoulder to the wheel,
at least till I get the business started!"

"Well, for to-day I can't say." She looked deedily into his face.
"I've got a prize upstairs."

"Oh? What's that?"

"A husband--almost."

"No!"

"Yes. It's Jude. He's come back to me."

"Your old original one? Well, I'm damned!"

"Well, I always did like him, that I will say."

"But how does he come to be up there?" said Donn, humour-struck, and
nodding to the ceiling.

"Don't ask inconvenient questions, Father. What we've to do is to
keep him here till he and I are--as we were."

"How was that?"

"Married."

"Ah... Well it is the rummest thing I ever heard of--marrying an
old husband again, and so much new blood in the world! He's no
catch, to my thinking. I'd have had a new one while I was about it."

"It isn't rum for a woman to want her old husband back for
respectability, though for a man to want his old wife back--well,
perhaps it is funny, rather!" And Arabella was suddenly seized with
a fit of loud laughter, in which her father joined more moderately.

"Be civil to him, and I'll do the rest," she said when she had
recovered seriousness. "He told me this morning that his head ached
fit to burst, and he hardly seemed to know where he was. And no
wonde