“By gen, it’s a trump card! I’d give a dollar to see Baldwin’s face when he hears tell what we’re doing! Jobs? There’ll be no lack of ’em. I mayn’t have your headpiece for scheming out ways and means, but Baldwin hasn’t a man in his shop ’at can come near me at my job, and there’s more than him knows it. It’ll serve the old lickpenny right, and teach him not to rob widows. Where’ll we find a shop?” Maniwel looked at him steadily for a moment or two, and Hannah watched her father’s face, knowing what he was thinking. “When folks are in a hurry to swallow they have to have their meat minced for ’em. It ’ud suit me better, lad, if you’d get off spoon-food, and begin to chew for yourself. You’ve jumped at this plan o’ mine same as a bairn at a rattle. You’d better sleep on it, and then we’ll talk about t’ shop. But if we do start for ourselves it shall be in t’ street called Straight, anyway. Baldwin’s for himself all t’ way through; we’ll be for ourselves and company.” Hannah turned to look at her brother; but it was evident he had only partly heard his father’s remarks, being engaged with his own thoughts; and her brow bent into an expression of impatience. CHAPTER IV IN WHICH THE WOMAN ENTERS WITH THE SERPENT THREE hours later Hannah and Jagger were alone, but for a while neither of them had much to say. To watch the changing expression on the woman’s face you would have said that tenderness and contempt were striving for the mastery on the battlefield of her soul and that the issue was uncertain. Hannah was only thirty but Nature had taken little pains in her fashioning, leaving her angular in outline and pinched in features; and responsibility had unloaded its burden on her shoulders at an age when most girls are unfettered or at worst in leading-strings, for the mother had died when Hannah was fourteen. Ten years later the grandmother, recently widowed, had come to share the home and the income and to add to the girl’s trials. Grannie was masterful; but Hannah was mistress and had no mind at twenty-four to bend her neck to the authority of seventy-five. The encounters that took place were by tacit consent of both parties confined to occasions when the men-folk were out of hearing, and victory was not always on one side, but in the end Hannah triumphed, and her crowning achievement, the trophy of her success, was not in the subjugation but the conversion of her grandmother. In the hour that grannie lay down her arms she confessed that she “liked a lass o’ mettle,” and could rest satisfied that one of the family had “a bit o’ bite in her,” now that Maniwel had turned queer in his head, and had bred a son whose bark was loud enough but who never bared his teeth in the good old moorland fashion. From that time Hannah’s ascendancy had been undisputed, but the conflict, and the anxiety that had attended her father’s accident, had left their mark