while from week to week he moved on. The sense of liberty, of having two legs where other men were shackled, was potent enough to carry him through the traveling on Sundays, often all day long, with dreary waits at empty, shuttered stations, and blinded him to the small miseries, the mean scandals, the jealousies, rivalries and wounded sensibilities which occupied the rest of the company. . . . There was one woman--she was perhaps forty-five--who sat opposite to him on three consecutive Sundays. She played, in both pieces, the inevitable dowager to chaperone the heroine; she was always knitting, and, with brows furrowed, she stared fixedly in front of her; her lips were always moving, and every now and then she would nod her head vigorously, or she would stop and stare desperately, and put her hands to her lips and her heart would leap to her mouth. At first Old Mole thought she was counting the stitches; but once, in the train, she laid aside her knitting and produced a roll of cloth and cut out a pair of trousers. Her lips went more furiously than ever, and suddenly her eyes stared and she held out her hand with the scissors as though to ward off some danger. Old Mole leaned across and spoke to her, but she was so taken up with her own thoughts that she replied: "Yes, it's better weather, isn't it?" jerked out a watery smile and withdrew into herself. When Old Mole asked Matilda why the woman counted her stitches even when she was not knitting, and why, apparently, she dropped so many stitches when she was, Matilda told him that the woman had lost her voice and her figure and could make very little money, and had a husband who was a comedian, the funniest fellow in the world off the stage, but when he was "on" all his humor leaked away, and though he worked very hard no one laughed at him, and he, too, made very little money. They had six children, and all the time in the train the woman was making calculations. She often borrowed money, but that only added to her perplexity, because she could not bear not to pay it back. This story almost moved Old Mole, but his mood was too strong for him, and the woman only came forward to the foreground of the puppet show, a sort of link between the free players, the colored, brilliant dolls, and the drab mannikins who lived imprisoned in the background.