“Hurrah! Vote for Popjoy!” yelled the man with the flag as he flourished it over his head, and, swinging round the corner, the donkey came almost against the bearer with the coffin, and swerved so suddenly that the banner-bearer lost his balance, and was precipitated from the cart into the road, and fell at the feet of Jack Weldon. “What are you doing there?” shouted the fallen man. “I’ll have a law passed to get the likes of you transported for life!” He tried to rise, but found that he could not, and began to swear. Then Mrs. Weldon pushed forward. “Thomas!” she cried, in a voice harsh with indignation, “do you know where you be? and to whom you speak, you ill-conditioned tadpole?” “I know well enough. I’m on the road—and I’ve hurt my leg somehow.” “Do you know what you be?” again exclaimed Mrs. Weldon. “I should think I did. I’m a free and enlightened elector.” “Look up, Thomas Leveridge, from where you lie, stopping your little Rosie on the way to her grave.” “Ah!” threw in the woman from the toll-gate, “if you, her own father, won’t come home to see your own sick and dying child, we, who’re no relations, must bury her without consideration of you.” Then up came the companion of the prostrate man, who by this time had mastered the ass. “I say, Thomas Leveridge! what’s to be done?” he asked. The man on the road did not answer at once; he looked with glazed eyes and quivering mouth at the little chest. He tried to speak, but he could not. He tried to raise himself, but was powerless. “Shall we get you into the cart?” asked his comrade. “Ay,” answered Leveridge; “take me home. I can’t go nowhere else. Poor Marianne!” Some hours later the little funeral party returned to Woodman’s Well, without the deal chest, walking at an accelerated pace—or rather, let me say that the old women walked fast; the young mourners lagged. Eventually they got home, and Jack entered the cottage of the Leveridges. Without a word he ascended the rickety staircase. It was strewn with scraps of coloured paper, on which were stray letters of the exhortation, “Vote for Popjoy!” He might have been following a paper-chase; for at intervals along the road, down the lane, these coloured scraps had shown the way to the cottage. They had fallen from the hand of the injured man as he had been conveyed home, and on his way had torn the posters, and strewn them. On the bed in the upper chamber lay Thomas Leveridge. A surgeon had already been there, and had pronounced the hip dislocated and a bone broken. He had replaced the joint and had spliced the bone. Leveridge was condemned to occupy his bed for some weeks. Beside him sat his wife, with red eyes and pale cheeks; on the floor was a cradle, empty; and she, inadvertently, was rocking it with her foot. Her heart was too full for words.