After standing for some minutes by the weighing machine trying to make head or tail of his own sensations, Bowden took the letter up to the girl Pansy, lying beside her offspring in her narrow cabin of a room. In countrymen who never observe themselves, a letter or event which ploughs up fallow land of feeling, or blasts the rock of some prejudice, causes a prolonged mental stammer or hiatus. So Ned wanted to marry the girl if he came home! The Bowdens were an old family, the girl cross-bred. It wasn’t fitting! And the news that Ned had it on his mind brought home to Bowden as never before the danger his son was in. With profound instinct he knew that compunction did not seriously visit those who felt life sure and strong within them; so that there was a kind of superstition in the way he took the letter up to the girl. After all, the child was as much bone of Ned’s bone and of his own as if the girl had been married in church--a boy too. He gave it her with the words: “Here’s a present for yu and Edward the seventh.” The village widow, accustomed to attend these simple cases, stepped outside, and while the girl was reading, Bowden sat down on the low seat beneath the little window. The ceiling just touched his head if he remained standing. Her coarse nightgown fell back from her strong arms and neck, her hair showed black and lustreless on the coarse pillow; he could not see her face for the letter, but he heard her sigh. Somehow he felt sorry. “Shid ought to du yu gude,” he said. Dropping the letter, so that her eyes met his, the girl spoke. “Tisn’ nothin’ to me; Ned don’t care for me no more.” Something inexpressibly cheerless in the tone of her voice, and uncannily searching in her dark gaze, disturbed Bowden. “Cheer up!” he murmured; “yu’m got a monstrous baby there, all to yureself.” Going up to the bed, he clucked his tongue, and held his finger out to the baby. He did it softly and with a sort of native aptitude. “He’m a proper little man.” Then he took up the letter, for there ‘wasn’t,’ he felt, ‘no yuse in leavin’ it there against Ned if an’ in case he should change his mind when he came safe ’ome.’ But as he went out he saw the girl Pansy put the baby to her breast, and again he felt that disturbance, as of pity. With a nod to the village widow, who was sitting on an empty grocery box reading an old paper by the light coming through half a skylight, Bowden descended the twisting stairs to the kitchen. His mother was seated where the sunlight fell, her bright little dark eyes moving among their mass of wrinkles. Bowden stood a moment watching her. “Well, Granny,” he said, “yu’m a great-granny now.” The old lady nodded, mumbled her lips a little in a smile, and rubbed one hand on the other. Bowden experienced a shock. “There ain’t no sense in et all,” he muttered to himself, without knowing too well what he meant. VIII