“Oh, you don’t need to ’urry,” said she, tartly. “’E be only just gone round the corner to the Parsonage with your basket o’ linen. ’E won’t be back just yet.” A faint tremor ran through Mrs. Collins’ body even to the hand that she stretched out to take her parcel, but she said nothing, and to any observer less keen than the rival laundress, the tremor was but a shiver that was easily accounted for by the sea-fog that was slowly sweeping up across the marsh below. “Well, I wish you joy o’ getting him back so well set up,” said Mr. Barfield, good-naturedly, as he tied the knot in the string. “It must do your ’eart good, I’m sure, to have him by to give you a ’and again when you ’ave to work for yourself all the year round.” The widow looked at him, and in her eyes was a hardness that might well have chilled a braver man. “Thank you,” she said coldly, “I don’t know as one day makes much odds.” Mr. Barfield was silent, and so indeed was Mrs. Cave, but the plumber’s wife, blundering on, said patronizingly: “There now, you oughtn’t to take it so ungrateful, and him so nice and obliging to you. There’s some lads ’ud be so stuck up with being raised up—why, they might think it beneath ’em to do such a job!” Mrs. Cave smiled, and then laughed outright, and the old woman’s eyes grew harder than ever. Mr. Barfield brought her change—two coppers and a threepenny-bit—and laid it on the counter before her. She took it up without a word, nodded good-night a trifle more surlily than usual, and without unlocking her set lips or turning her eyes once upon either of the two women, passed out into the dusk. Her face was as thunder. “Well, ’pon my word, it ain’t no sort o’ use tryin’ to be civil and kindly to ’er,” sighed Mrs. Neave; but Mr. Barfield, who had seen the widow’s face, felt a vague sense of pity rise in his calculating little soul, and said as he stuck his pen briskly behind his ear after “entering” Mrs. Neave’s purchase: “We can’t always just tell, ye know. She may be glad enough to get a sight of ’im though she do talk so short, and as like as not she never sent him round with the linen at all.” Mrs. Cave was already in the road; she was watching the mother, who set her face once more to the sunset, and, whipped by the creeping mist, struggled on to the cross-roads, where a line of straight pine-stems stood black against the sky that flamed beyond the downs: the downs were blue with mist and the sky was red—red and angry—and the spare bent figure made a spot upon it, and that little spot was the blackest in the whole scene. “No,” said Mrs. Cave decisively, to those within, “I shouldn’t think she did send him round with it! I should like to know what a body’d want to spend years toilin’ and moilin’ for, except to have the boy cut a bit of a figure when ’e come back among them as knowed ’im a little dirty brat! _She_ sent him indeed!” Mrs. Cave stuck her sharp little nose in the air, and Mrs. Neave retorted stoutly: