But the case was desperate. How I pleaded it I no longer remember, nor is it of any importance. I think there were two interviews. In the end the cottage was let, not direct to Bettesworth, but to me with permission to sublet it to him; and two, or at most three days afterwards, Bettesworth was in possession, and the other cottage once more stood empty. So the squalid episode was over. After such a narrow escape from the workhouse, it was as it were with a gasp of relief that the old couple settled down in their new abode, safe at last. The place, though, was not one which Bettesworth would have chosen, had there been a choice. Down there by the meadow where he had come from, though the cottage might be crazy, the outlook had been fair. He had been peacefully alone there; in summer evenings he had heard the men mowing; on winter nights there was the wind in the withies and the sound of the stream. But from this time onwards we have to think of him as living in one of a mean group of tenements which exhibit their stuccoed ugliness nakedly on a bleak slope above the meadow. As to the neighbours--some of them resented his coming, for of course the scandal of his wife's condition was public property by now. With a certain defiant shame, therefore, he crept in amongst them. Fortunately, the people in the next-door cottage--an unmarried labourer and his mother--knew Bettesworth's record, and regarded him as a veteran to be cared for; and not many weeks passed before the old man felt himself established in their good-will, and was trying to persuade himself that all was for the best. Of course, he was only partially successful in that endeavour. Occasional bitter remarks showed that he still harboured a resentment against the owner of the cottage from which he had been turned out, and, in fact, there were circumstances which would have made it difficult for him quite to forget the affair. Perched on one of the steepest of the bluffs, high above the stream, the cottage in which he was not good enough to live stood beside the path he now had to travel to and from his work every day. Often, as his legs grew weary and his breath short with ascending the footpath, he must have felt tempted to curse the place. Often it must have seemed to taunt him with his unfitness. Even when he was at work, there it was full in sight. In bad weather, and as he grew feebler, it stood there on its uplifted brow, not sheltering the wife to whom he wanted to go at dinner-time, but like an obstacle in his way. Instead of being his home, it cut him off from his home; and he took to bringing his dinner with him, wrapped in a handkerchief; poor cold food which he frequently left untasted, preferring a pipe.