wedding
is to be and what she is to wear, and begs to hear if there be
anything wrong. And all I can answer is, that you are well, with a
line or two about the children. They must think me a fool, and it
has kept me miserable ever since I came. But more I _will_ not say.
At least--" She seemed about to correct herself, but came to an
abrupt halt and began brushing vigorously. Hetty could not see the
flush on her sallow face.

"Dear old Molly!" Hetty murmured the name of her favourite sister.
"But I could not write without telling her and loading her poor
conscience."

"Much you think of conscience, with a letter from him in your hand at
this minute!"

"But I do think of conscience. And the best proof of it is, I am
going home."

"Going home!" Patty faced about now, and with a scared face.

"Yes." Hetty put her feet out of bed and sat for a moment on the
edge of it. "Mrs. Grantham paid me my wages yesterday, and now I
have three pounds in my pocket. I am going home--to tell them."

"You mean to tell them!"

"Not a doubt of it. But why look as if you had seen a ghost?"

"And what do you suppose will happen?"

"Mother and Molly will cry, and Emmy will make an oration which I
shall interrupt, and Kezzy will open her eyes at such a monster, and
father will want to horsewhip me, but restrain himself and turn me
from the door. Or perhaps he will lock me up--oh Patty, cannot you
see that I'm weeping, not joking? But it has to be done, and I am
going to be brave and do it."

"Very well, then. Now listen to me.--You cannot."

"Cannot? Why?"

"There's no room, to begin with--not a bed in the house. Sam and his
wife are there, and the child, on a visit."

"Sam there! And you never told me.--Oh, Pat, Pat, and I might have
missed him!" She sprang up from the bed and began her dressing in a
fever of haste.

"But what will you do?"

"Go home and find Sam, of course."

"I don't see how Sam can help you. He did not help Emmy much: and
his wife will be there, remember."

There was no love lost between Sam's sisters and Sam's wife--a
practical little woman with a sharp tongue and a settled conviction
that her husband's relatives were little better than lunatics.
She understood the Rectory's strict rules of conduct as little as its
feckless poverty (for so she called it). That a household which held
its head so high should be content with a parlour furnished like a
barn, sit down to meals scarc