While there were but few people outside the row of cottages where they lived who even knew Matthew and his wife by sight, everybody knew Keturah. Always in mischief, always _en évidence_, always doing the unexpected, undaunted by misfortunes and punishments which would have struck terror into the heart of any well-regulated little girl; she had, during her six months’ residence in our midst, attained to a notoriety which was apparently as much a matter of indifference to her as it was painful to her parents. Her father looked upon her as a cross to be borne with Christian fortitude. He wrestled in prayer on her behalf, and on occasion with Keturah herself, accentuating his remarks by means of a stick. But, as Thomas Beames, her slave and shadow, remarked on one occasion, when they played truant to attend a meet some seven miles off, "They’ll beat we when us do get ’ome; but us’ll ’ave our fun fust." Thomas was a round-faced, in no way extraordinarily small boy, who was dominated by Keturah’s stronger character; he loved her, why, he himself could not have told. Perhaps because he admired the way she always made sure of her "fun" regardless of consequences—a disregard the stranger in Keturah’s case, for Nemesis was by no means leaden-footed. As a rule, the punishment was in very truth the other half of the crime. She loved her mother, and regarded her father much in the same light that he regarded her, with this difference that she looked for no change in him, but with a philosophy as pagan as the rest of her conduct accepted his existence as a necessary evil. Indeed, had Matthew but known it, she extracted considerable "fun" out of circumventing him. But Keturah had fallen on evil days. A fishing expedition, during which she tumbled into the canal, and after which she walked about till she was, as she put it, "moderate dry"—"at least not to notice"—had ended in the mysterious illness to which the doctor had just been called. Matthew Moulder had gone that evening to a prayer-meeting in a neighbouring village, where he would stay the night with a hospitable brother; this fact, taken together with the fact that Keturah seemed most alarmingly ill, had given her mother the courage to call in the doctor. He had seen Keturah, had expressed himself with his customary vigour as to the imbecility of people who could treat a case of acute pneumonia with "Dinver’s Lung Tonic" for sole remedy, and now he had returned to the little bedroom to have a final look at the child. She was too weak to raise herself on her elbow, but she turned her head on the doctor’s entrance. "Shall I go to hell?" she asked, devouring his face with her great fever-bright eyes. The doctor started. She had not volunteered any remark before. "God bless my soul, no!" he exclaimed. "You’ll go to Weston-super-Mare when you’re well enough." Keturah shook her head. "But if I don’t get well? Shall I go to hell?"