veral dresses requiring the
needle. Two black patches on the low ceiling showed in what positions
the lamp stood by turns.

Emma's eldest sister was moving about the room. Hers were the children;
her husband had been dead a year or more. She was about thirty years of
age, and had a slatternly appearance; her face was peevish, and seemed
to grudge the half-smile with which it received the visitor.

'You've no need to look round you,' she said. 'We're in & regular
pig-stye, and likely to be. Where's there a chair?'

She shook some miscellaneous articles on to the floor to provide a seat.

'For mercy's sake don't speak too loud, and wake them children. Bertie's
had the earache; he's been crying all day. What with him and Jane we've
had a blessing, I can tell you. Can I put these supper things away,
Emma?'

'I'll do it,' was the other's reply. 'Won't you have a bit more, Kate?'

'I've got no mind for eating. Well, you may cut a slice and put it on
the mantelpiece. I'll go and sit with Jane.'

Richard sat and looked about the room absently. The circumstances of his
own family had never fallen below the point at which it is possible to
have regard for decency; the growing up of himself and of his brothers
and sister had brought additional resources to meet extended needs, and
the Mutimer characteristics had formed a safeguard against improvidence.
He was never quite at his ease in this poverty-cumbered room, which he
seldom visited.

'You ought to have a fire,' he said.

'There's one in the other room,' replied Kate. 'One has to serve us.'

'But you can't cook there.'

'Cook? We can boil a potato, and that's about all the cooking we can do
now-a-days.'

She moved to the door as she spoke, and, before leaving the room, took
advantage of Richard's back being turned to make certain exhortatory
signs to her sister. Emma averted her head.

Kate closed the door behind her. Emma, having removed the eatables to
the cupboard, came near to Richard and placed her arm gently upon his
shoulders. He looked at her kindly.

'Kate's been so put about with Bertie,' she said, in a tone of excuse.
'And she was up nearly all last night.'

'She never takes things like you do,' Richard remarked.

'She's got more to bear. There's the children always making her anxious.
She took Alf to the hospital this afternoon, and the doctor says he must
have--I forget the name, somebody's food. But it's two-and-ninepence for
ever such a littl