he sat there, but when he stood up he was a giant, in
corduroys, and a check cap over his black eyes. Picturesque beggar. And
the farm hand had deserted her, and there was a smell of burning wood,
and the sky was like a velvet curtain. What would you? Eliza did not go
home that night, nor the next, nor the next. She stayed with the
travelling tinker until he tired of her, and that was very soon. For
him, she was no more than the fly that happened to get into his web, but
for Eliza, the tinker--the tinker was beauty and romance. The tinker was
life. And he sent her back to the ways of virtue permanently soured, yet
proud. Thus, my dear young friend, we see--"

"Don't!" Helen cried. "You're making me sorry for Eliza. I don't want to
be sorry for her. And you're making me like the tinker. He's attractive.
How horrid that he should be attractive." She shuddered and shook her
head. "Your story is too full of firelight--and the night. I'll go and
get supper ready."

"Miriam's doing it. Stay here and I'll tell you some more."

But she slipped past him and reached the kitchen from the garden.

"Rupert has been telling me a story," she said a little breathlessly to
Miriam who was filling a tray with the noisy indifference of a careless
maid-servant.

"Hang the plates! Hang the dishes! What story?"

"It's rather wonderful, I think. It's about the Mackenzies' Eliza."

"Then of course it's wonderful. And hang the knives and forks!" She
threw them on the tray.

"And there's a travelling tinker in it." With her hands at her throat,
she looked into the fire and Miriam looked at her.

"I'll ask him to tell it to me," she said, but very soon she returned to
the kitchen, grumbling. "What nonsense! It's not respectable, and it
isn't even true."

"It's as true as anything else," Helen said.

"Oh, you're mad. And so is Rupert. Let's have supper and go to bed. Why
can't we have a servant to do all this? Why don't we pay for one
ourselves?"

"I don't want one."

"But I do, and my hands are ruined."

"Upstairs in Jane," Helen said, "in the small right-hand drawer of my
chest of drawers, there's the lotion--"

"It's not only my hands! It's my whole life! Your lotion isn't going to
cure my life!" She sat on the edge of a chair and drooped there.

"No," Helen said. "But what's the matter with your life?"

Miriam flapped her hands. "I'm so tired of being good. I want--I want--"

Helen knelt beside her. "Is it Zebedee you want