r, much after the fashion of a terrier
shaking a rat.

"Are you a born natural?" she screamed. "Pilgrims of the night, indeed!
I'll pilgrim you, you chuckle-headed idiot. Here are your betters
trying to make themselves heard." Then Caleb slowly unstopped his ears,
and rose rather stiffly to his feet.

"You have got no call to be so violent, Kezia," he returned meekly.
"Oh, it is the gentleman who lent us the umbrella. Kit and I were going
to bring it back this afternoon, sir, but I had to finish a job I had
in hand."

"There is no hurry," returned Malcolm. "We were in this direction, so I
thought I would save you the trouble." Malcolm looked curiously round
the room as he spoke.

He was not surprised when he learnt afterwards that the second Mrs.
Martin objected to the basement. It was certainly a gloomy little
place, though scrupulously clean and neat. The sunshine of a July day
filtered reluctantly through the small, opaque-looking window. Caleb's
bench and tools were placed just underneath it, and above his head a
linnet hopped and twittered in a green cage. Kit's perambulator
occupied one corner, while Kit herself, seated at the table in a high
chair, was busily engaged in ironing out some ragged doll-garments with
a tiny bent flat-iron. Anna regarded her pitifully--the small shrunken
figure and sunken chest, and the thin white face with its halo of red
curls. But Kit was almost too absorbed with her endeavour to get the
creases out of a doll's petticoat to heed her scrutiny. She only paused
to nod at Malcolm in a friendly way.

"I wasn't wet one little bit, though Ma'am scolded dad so," she
exclaimed in her high shrill voice. "I was like a queen in a big tent,
wasn't I, dad? I was awful comfortable."

"She might have been drowned dead for all the care he took," returned
Mrs. Martin with a contemptuous sniff, as she planted her arms akimbo
in her favourite attitude. Her elbows were so sharp and bony that Anna
thought of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. "If it weren't for me
that blessed lamb would be a corpse every day of her life--though I beg
and pray him on my bended knees not to run her into danger."

She was only a coarse-tongued virago, but even Anna, who had shrunk
from her, felt a little mollified and touched as she saw how tenderly
the rough hand rested on the child's curls. But Kit pushed it pettishly
away. "Don't, Ma'am, you've been and gone and spoiled Jemima's ball
dress, and she is going