final quality of what was
said.

"Please don't trouble."

"It's naw trooble--naw trooble at all. Maaggie'll 'ave got kettle on."

He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen. "Maaggie! Maaggie!" he
called. "Are yo' there? Putt kettle on and bring tae into t' parlor."

Alice looked about her while she waited.

Though she didn't know it, Jim Greatorex's parlor was a more tolerable
place than the Vicarage drawing-room. Brown cocoanut matting covered
its stone floor. In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a
rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets. The
wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight
barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period
of simplicity. The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room,
the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere
enough to be almost beautiful. Down the white ground of the wall-paper
an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between
parallel stripes of blue.

There were no ornaments to speak of in Greatorex's parlor but the
grocer's tea-caddies on the mantelshelf and the little china figures,
the spotted cows, the curly dogs, the boy in blue, the girl in pink;
and the lustre ware and the tea-sets, the white and gold, the blue
and white, crowded behind the diamond panes of the two black oak
cupboards. Of these one was set in the most conspicuous corner, the
other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare
save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups,
the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from
vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties--faces defiant, stolid
and pathetic; yearning, mournful, tender faces, slightly blurred.

All these objects impressed themselves on Ally's brain, adhering
to its obsession and receiving from it an immense significance and
importance.

* * * * *

She heard Maggie's running feet, and the great leisurely steps of
Greatorex, and his voice, soft and kind, encouraging Maggie.

"Theer--that's t' road. Gently, laass--moor' 'aaste, less spead. Now
t' tray--an' a clane cloth--t' woon wi' laace on 't. Thot's t' road."

Maggie whispered, awestruck by these preparations:

"Which coops will yo' 'ave, Mr. Greatorex?"

"T' best coops, Maaggie."

Maggie had to fetch them from the corner cupboard (they were the white
and gold). At G