"I knew you would come, sir," she whispered, letting her thin white fingers play amongst the golden curls of a little head, but half-concealed in her lap, where one bright round eye as peeping timidly out to watch the stranger; and then, as the curate took one of the broken chairs and sat beside the sick woman, whenever she spoke it was in a whisper, and with many a timid glance at the ladder and open trap in the roof, where her master stood, as though she feared to call down punishment upon her head,--"I knew you would come; and Bill was easy to-day, and come and fetched you, though he came back and said you were busy, and would not stop." "Look alive, there, and get that over!" cried Mr Jarker from the trap. "I ain't a-goin' to stand here all day;" and by way of giving effect, or for emphasis, this remark was accompanied by a kick at the ladder, and a shake of the trap. Then followed an interval of peace, during which the presence of the domestic tyrant was made known only by the fumes of his tobacco, which floated down into the room, and made the poor woman cough terribly. Once Mr Sterne was about to tell the fellow to cease, but the look of horror in the woman's face, and the supplicating joining of her hands, made him pause, for he knew that he would be but adding to her suffering when his back was turned. The open trap seemed to act as a sort of retiring-room for Mr Jarker when anyone was in the attic that he did not wish to see; but every now and then during the earnest conversation with the suffering woman, there came a kick and a growl, and a shake of the ladder, which made Mr Sterne frown, and the poor woman start as if in dread. And so, during the remainder of the curate's stay, the consolatory words he uttered were again and again interrupted; while at last the voice came growling down as if in answer to a statement Mrs Jarker had just made: "Don't you tell no lies, now, come, or I shall make it hot for yer!" When in the involuntary shudder the woman gave, there was plainly enough written for the curate's reading the long and cruel records of how "hot" for her it had often been made. And now the importunities of the child by her knee aroused the poor woman to a forgetfulness of self in motherly cares, when the curate took his leave, but in nowise hurried by the savage shake that Jarker gave to the ladder--a shake which brought down a few scraps of plaster, to fall upon the cages and make the songsters flutter timidly against their prison-bars. Half-way down the stairs Mr Sterne encountered the woman with whom he had seen Lucy in the Lane; the woman he presumed to be the mother of the child Mrs Jarker had now for some time nursed.