"Good hearing!--he will be back in the midst of us before we know where we are. Mattie, I'm sure you have a headache?" "A little one--nothing to complain about." "Why don't you go for a walk?--it's not very late. What a time it is since you have seen Mr. Wesden!" "I will go there." Mattie sprang to her feet. "Yes, I _will_ go--at once." Mattie ran up-stairs, quickly dressed herself, gave one frightened glance at her own face in the dressing-glass, and then hurried down-stairs away from the silence wherein she could not trust herself. "I am going now," she said, and hurried away. Mr. Gray was disturbed by Mattie's eagerness to depart, but explained it by the rules he considered most natural. "She is unsettled by Sid's absence--by the danger he is in. Well, there's nothing remarkable in that." He took his work into the shop and devoted himself to it, in the leisure that his customers--few and far between after nightfall--afforded him. When the shutters were up before the windows, and the gas turned low, he stood at the door waiting for Mattie, who was late, and speculating as to the advisability of proceeding in search of her. Mattie came swiftly towards him whilst he watched. She had been trying to outwalk her thoughts, and failed--the odds were against her. "Ah! that is you, Mattie!--how are they?" "Well. I did not see Miss Wesden. She was not at home." "All the time with that old man?" he said, with a little of his past weakness developing itself. "We have been speaking of old times--and Harriet. Oh! dear! I am very tired. May I go up to my room at once?" "If you will--but supper is ready, Mattie." "Not any for me. Good night." Mattie thought that she had made good her escape, but she was mistaken; on the stairs Ann Packet had been waiting to waylay her, and to talk of the little events of that day--any talk whatever, so that she saw Mattie for a while, after the day's labour was ended. Mattie was considerate even in her distress; she stood on the stairs listening to Ann's rambling accounts of minor things, waiting for the end of the narrative, and only expressing her weariness by a little quivering sigh, now and then. After the story there was Ann Packet to hold the candle closer to her face, and see a change in Mattie also. Mattie had feared this--knowing Ann's vigilance--but there was the old plea of a headache to urge, and all the old receipts of which Ann Packet had ever heard for the headache to listen to. Ann Packet knew an old woman of her workhouse days who had had "drefful headaches," and this was how she cured hers--and off went Ann Packet into more rambling incoherencies.