en they are wanted."

The speaker came forward and showed herself. She was a woman of some
forty years or more, looking older than she was, and evidently very
weary. She wore a plain untrimmed skirt of dark woollen stuff, short to
the ankles, a long linen apron, and a blue hood over her head and
shoulders. Resting her worn hands on the half-door, she looked drearily
up and down the street, as if in languid hope of catching a glimpse of
the boys who should have been there, and were not.

"Well, there's no help for it!" she said at last, "Flemild, child, you
must go for the water to-night."

"I? O Mother!" The girl's tone was one of manifest reluctance.

"It can't be helped, child. Take Derette with you, and be back as quick
as you can, before the dusk comes on. The lads should have been here to
spare you, but they only think of their own pleasure. I don't know what
the world's coming to, for my part."

"Father Dolfin says it's going to be burnt up," said a third voice--that
of a child--from the interior of the house.

"Time it was!" replied the mother bluntly. "There's nought but trouble
and sorrow in it--leastwise I've never seen much else. It's just work,
work, work, from morning to night, and often no rest to speak of from
night to morning. You get up tireder than you went to bed, and you may
just hold your tongue for all that any body cares, as the saints know.
Well, well!--Come, make haste, child, or there'll be a crowd round Saint
Martin's Well." [Note 1.]

"O Mother! mayn't I go to Plato's Well?"

"What, and carry your budget four times as far? Nonsense, Flemild!"

"But, Mother, please hear me a minute! It's a quiet enough way, when
you are once past the Bayly, and I can step into the lodge and see if
Cousin Stephen be at home. If he be, he'll go with me, I know."

"You may go your own way," said the mother, not quite pleasantly.
"Young folks are that headstrong! I can't look for my children to be
better than other folks'. If they are as good, it's as much as one need
expect in this world."

Flemild had been busily tying on a red hood while her mother spoke, and
signing to her little sister to do the same. Then the elder girl took
from a corner, where it hung on a hook, a budget or pail of boiled
leather, a material then much used for many household vessels now made
of wood or metal: and the girls went out into the narrow street.

The street was called Kepeharme Lane, and the city wa