To finish, then: the workhouse infirmary was decided upon, as the only place where Bettesworth could get the nursing without which he would probably die. Fortunately, he received the proposal reasonably; he was ready to go anywhere to get well, as he felt that he never would at home. He merely stipulated that his wife must not be left. A walk to find the relieving officer and get the necessary orders from him was to me the only pleasant part of the episode. It took me, on a brilliant spring evening, some three miles farther into the country, where I saw the first primroses I had seen outside my garden that year. It also enabled me to see how parish relief looks from the side of the poor who have to ask for it, but that was not so pleasant. However, the officer was civil enough; he gave me the necessary orders; we made all the arrangements, and on the following day the two old Bettesworths were driven off miserably in a cab to the workhouse. How fervently everybody hoped, then, that Bettesworth would leave his wife behind, if he ever came out of the institution himself alive! And yet, though it's true he was dependent on me for the wherewithal to keep his home together, how much nobler was his own behaviour than that we would have commended! Once in the infirmary, he recovered quickly; and in ten days, to my amazement (and annoyance at the time), word came that the old couple were out again. They had toddled feebly home--a two-mile journey; they two together, not to be separated; each of them the sole person in the world left to the other. The old woman, people told me, was amazingly clean. Her hair, which had been cut, proved white beyond expectation; her face was almost comely now that it was washed. Had I not seen her? What a pity it was, wasn't it, the old man wouldn't leave her up there to be took care of, and after all the trouble it had been, too, to get 'em there! I believe it was on the day before Good Friday (1904) that they returned home. When Bettesworth got to work again is more than my memory tells me. I suppose, though, that I must have paid him a visit first--probably during the following week; for I remember hoping to see the old woman's white hair and clean face, and being disappointed to find her as grimy as ever--her visage almost as black as her hands, and her hair an ashy grey. XXIII _May 16, 1904._--"It is long," says a note of the 16th of May, "since I wrote down any of Bettesworth's talk; but it flows on constantly--less vivacious than of old, perhaps, for he is visibly breaking since his illness in the spring, and is a stiff, shiftless, rather weary, rather sad old man; but his garrulity has not lost its flavour of the country-side; and many of his sayings sound to me like the traditional quips and phrases of earlier generations."