“Lor’, yes, ’Melia be off to the ’op-pickin’ again, sure enough,” grumbled a shrivelled and careworn little woman, who stood bent over an ironing-board just inside of a poor cottage on the brow of the hill. “Though, as I says to ’er, it’d be more worth my while for ye to stay at ’ome to-day and help me with this washin’, for it be more than one pair of ’ands can do to get all them shirts ready to go ’ome to the Priory to-night.” “Why, ye ought to make that girl mind ye better, Mrs. Shaw, indeed ye ought,” declared the neighbour to whom this feeble complaint was addressed, and who stood poised on the threshold, twisting the pinch of starch that she had come to borrow in a paper, and throwing back her advice as she prepared to descend the steps into the road. “Well, it don’t seem much use talkin’ to girls now-a-days,” moaned the mother helplessly. “They be all so mighty sure they know all about it. In my time it weren’t considered respectable for a young woman to go ’op-pickin’ all by ’erself like that; but, Lor’, things be all changed since I were young.” “Maybe they ain’t so much changed as you think for, ’Liza Shaw,” nodded the neighbour—Martha Jones by name—sententiously. “There be some as say she be too much with the men, be your daughter; there be some as says as she be too fond o’ feathers and fashions and sick-like; and there be some as can chaff her about them dark lanes of a summer night.” Mrs. Shaw flushed all over her poor wrinkled, sallow face as she put down one iron and took up another with a trembling hand, holding it to her cheek to test the heat. “I should like to know who they can be, then,” said she with a note of righteous indignation in her quivering voice. “I never did ’old with them dark lanes, and ’Melia knows it; but when it comes to be’aving—well, there, ’Melia may be a bit light-’earted—I don’t say she bain’t—but she comes o’ respectable folk, and none can say contrairy to that.” “Oh, Lor’ bless you, yes; no offence, I’m sure,” declared Martha Jones, retreating. “Girls will be girls, so I say. But I’d make her do a bit at them shirts to-night. ’Tis but fair to you.” She nodded in an offhand, friendly way as she shambled down the rough brick steps to the road—the matter dismissed from her mind. But the poor widow drew many a laboured sigh from her aching breast as the iron passed quickly or slowly over the white linen; and when she stepped to the threshold now and then to look to the children playing in the road there was more than the usual fret of work unfinished and worry to come on her weary face, and Martha Jones’s friendly advice was the cause. Meanwhile, in the sun-steeped hop-gardens down the hill towards the sea, ’Melia was taking her fill of health and fun.