oung woman whose
rather unresponsive face wakened somewhat when she saw who waited.

"Feyther," she called out, "it's Mester Langley, an' he's getten a
stranger wi' him."

"Feyther," approaching the door, showed himself a burly individual, with
traces of coal-dust in all comers not to be reached by hurried and not
too fastidious ablutions. Clouds of tobacco-smoke preceded and followed
him, and much stale incense from the fragrant weed exhaled itself from
his well-worn corduroys. "I ha' not nivver seed him afore," he remarked
after a gruff by no means-ill-natured greeting, signifying the stranger
by a duck of the head in his direction.

"A Lancashire lad, Janner," answered Langley, "I want a home for him."

Janner regarded him with evident interest, but shook his head dubiously.
"Ax th' missus," he remarked succinctly: "dunnot ax me."

Langley's good-humored laugh had a touch of conscious power in it. If it
depended upon "th' missus" he was safe enough. His bright good looks and
gay grace of manner never failed with the women. The most practical and
uncompromising melted, however unwillingly, before his sunshine, and the
suggestion of chivalric deference which seemed a second nature with him.
So it was easy enough to parley with "th' missus."

"A Lancashire lad, Mrs. Janner," he said, "and so I know you'll take
care of him. Lancashire folk have a sort of fellow feeling for each
other, you see; that was why I could not make up my mind to leave him
until I saw him in good hands; and yours are good ones. Give him a
square meal as soon as possible," he added in a lower voice: "I will be
accountable for him myself."

When he lifted his hat and rode away, the group watched him until he was
almost out of sight, the general sentiment expressing itself in every
countenance.

"Theer's summat noice about that theer young chap," Janner remarked with
the slowness of a man who was rather mystified by the fascination under
whose influence he found himself--"sum-mat as goes wi' th' grain loike."

"Ay," answered his wife, "so theer is; an' its natur' too. Coom along
in, lad," to Seth, "an ha' summat to eat: yo' look faintish."

Black Creek found him a wonderfully quiet member of society, the lad
Seth. He came and went to and from the mine with mechanical regularity,
working with the rest, taking his meals with the Janners, and sleeping
in a small shanty left vacant by the desertion of a young miner who had
found life at the se