Avisa and Honor worked side by side at the same wash-tub when their husbands were away, compared notes, listened to each other’s wisdom and opinions. Honor petted her friend’s little girls, and made sugar-plums and cakes for them; Avisa took the deepest interest in Honor’s approaching motherhood. A boy was born to the young wife—a flaxen, Saxon atom, with a first crop of hair the colour of straw, blue eyes, a flat nose like his father’s, red cheeks, and very fat limbs. Then came winter, and Henry Mogridge, catching a chill in the night watches by the river, passed away, a victim to his duty beside Dart. Honor comforted her friend as much as might be, and Postbridge showed sympathy also, until it was announced that Mrs. Mogridge had been left with £40 a year. Thereupon, feeling that commiseration would be wasted, the village turned to more interesting matters. Time sped, and when her child was a year old, Honor Haycraft followed Avisa into the state of widowhood. An accident at Vitifer Mine ended the burly Abel’s life; and with him there also perished another man and a boy. CHAPTER III The two widows, united in tribulation, became greater friends than before. Neither married again, and the one lived for her little maidens, the other for her son. Such close amity proved a strain at times, however, and as each knew all that there was to know about the other, each, conscious of the other’s imperfections, secretly regretted them in the friendliest spirit. Then came a little difference of opinion over the children; and then, from a personal attitude of irritation not divulged to anybody, Avisa, smarting somewhat at a pin-prick from Honor Haycraft touching her eldest little girl, spoke in overt fashion to a common friend at Postbridge. “She’s a very good woman,” said Mrs. Mogridge, while she drank a dish of tea with Mrs. Bloom. “A pattern wife her was, an’ steady as time since her man was called, an’ a pattern mother, though her goose is a swan, as one might expect, an’ she thinks her ugly, li’l fat boy is a cherub, poor dear. Well, ’tis natural so to do. I wouldn’t blame her; we mothers be all alike there. But I could wish she had more brains, an’ didn’t believe such a lot of rummage an’ nonsense. To credit all that dead an’ gone stuff about pixies, an’ the heath-hounds, an’ the use of herbs picked in moonlight, an’ the planting of seeds ’pon a Good Friday—why, ’tis onbecoming in a growed-up woman as went to Sunday-school; an’ I wish she’d drop it.”