flame of passionate pity, comforting,
soothing, promising help. Mrs. Hurd presently recovered enough to tell
her that Hurd had gone off that morning before it was light to a farm
near Thame, where it had been told him he might possibly find a job.

"But he'll not find it, miss, he'll not find it," she said, twisting her
hands in a sort of restless misery; "there's nothing good happens to
such as us. An' he wor allus a one to work if he could get it."

There was a sound outside. Mrs. Hurd flew to the door, and a short,
deformed man, with a large head and red hair, stumbled in blindly,
splashed with mud up to his waist, and evidently spent with long
walking.

He stopped on the threshold, straining his eyes to see through the
fire-lit gloom.

"It's Miss Boyce, Jim," said his wife. "Did you hear of anythink?"

"They're turnin' off hands instead of takin' ov 'em on," he said
briefly, and fell into a chair by the grate.

He had hardly greeted Marcella, who had certainly looked to be greeted.
Ever since her arrival in August, as she had told Aldous Raeburn, she
had taken a warm interest in this man and his family. There was
something about them which marked them out a bit from their
fellows--whether it was the husband's strange but not repulsive
deformity, contrasted with the touch of plaintive grace in the wife, or
the charm of the elfish children, with their tiny stick-like arms and
legs, and the glancing wildness of their blue eyes, under the frizzle of
red hair, which shone round their little sickly faces. Very soon she had
begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant
lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly
because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal
simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort. She soon
discovered or imagined that Hurd had more education than his neighbours.
At any rate, he would sit listening to her--and smoking, as she made him
do--while she talked politics and socialism to him; and though he said
little in return, she made the most of it, and was sure anyway that he
was glad to see her come in, and must some time read the labour
newspapers and Venturist leaflets she brought him, for they were always
well thumbed before they came back to her.

But to-night his sullen weariness would make no effort, and the hunted
restless glances he threw from side to side as he sat crouching over the
fire--the large mouth tig