hat the man was reading, or pretending to read, a
ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty by the
hand that was passed through the basket strap. Whether this apparent
cause were the real cause, or whether it were an assumed one to escape
an intercourse that would have been irksome to him, nobody but himself
could have said precisely; but his taciturnity was unbroken, and the
woman enjoyed no society whatever from his presence. Virtually she
walked the highway alone, save for the child she bore. Sometimes the
man's bent elbow almost touched her shoulder, for she kept as close to
his side as was possible without actual contact, but she seemed to
have no idea of taking his arm, nor he of offering it; and far from
exhibiting surprise at his ignoring silence she appeared to receive it
as a natural thing. If any word at all were uttered by the little group,
it was an occasional whisper of the woman to the child--a tiny girl in
short clothes and blue boots of knitted yarn--and the murmured babble of
the child in reply.

The chief--almost the only--attraction of the young woman's face was its
mobility. When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty,
and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features
caught slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made
transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips.
When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking,
she had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything
possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play. The
first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization.

That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of
the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such
relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale
familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they
moved down the road.

The wife mostly kept her eyes fixed ahead, though with little
interest--the scene for that matter being one that might have been
matched at almost any spot in any county in England at this time of
the year; a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly,
bordered by hedges, trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the
blackened-green stage of colour that the doomed leaves pass through on
their way to dingy, and yellow, and red. The grassy margin of the bank,
and the nea