Mrs. Birkin stood where she was, immersed in thought. Across the road the bonnet shop beckoned beguilingly, and her work-worn hand tightened upon her purse. Slowly she crossed the road, and once more stood staring at the bonnet. How beautiful it was! How brilliant its geraniums, how crisp and dainty its bosses and twists of ribbon! "It be like the bit o’ carpet beddin’ under Squoire’s drawin’-room windows, that ’a be," said Mrs. Birkin to herself. She stared so hard at the bonnet that her eyes grew misty, and the card with "much reduced" danced before her; but still she did not go into the shop. She stood like a statue for nearly five minutes, still staring at the bonnet; but she no longer saw it. What she saw was her own potato-patch last autumn; and in it, hard at work, was Ernie Comley, digging her potatoes for her because her lumbago was so bad. "What do it matter for a hold image like me what I do wear?" she muttered. Then she turned from the window that held her heart’s desire, and hurried down the market-place after Mrs. Comley and the rubsome Ernie. She found them staring gloomily into the window of the ready-made clothes shop. "You come in along o’ me," she cried excitedly. "There’s a suit in that window, ’This style eight and eleven three,’ as ’ll just do for Ernie, allowin’ for growth. I’ll buy it for un, an’ you can pay me back a bit at a time, as is most convenient. Come on in." The suit was bought, and presently Ernie, dirty, and as cheerful as he had been tearful a few minutes before, emerged from the doorway, hugging a large brown-paper parcel. "I must do my shoppin’ sharpish," Mrs. Birkin said as she came out of the shop, "or else Squoire ’ll be back before I be ready. Good afternoon to you. No; don’t you never name it. ’Tis no more than you’d ’a’ done for me." To herself she murmured as she hurried up the market-place, "I don’t suppose as she’ll ever pay I, she’s but a slack piece; but I couldn’t abear as that boy shouldn’t ’ave none of the fun. We’re none on us young but once." Mrs. Birkin’s Sunday bonnet was black, and although a black dress for best is not only permissible, but suitable, for an elderly cottager even at a wedding, to wear a black bonnet upon so festive an occasion is to commit a solecism of the most glaring kind. Mrs. Birkin was a woman of much resource. Once the bonnet of her dreams had become an impossibility, owing to the expense of Ernie Comley’s wedding garment, she set herself forthwith to manufacture another as like the one in the shop window at Ziren as her means would allow.