Something about this declaration tickled Alf. The emperor was forgotten in the naughty urchin. "So long, then!" he tittered. "Appy au-revoir! Thank-ye for a pleasant chat. This day week you can look forward to. I'll collect me rent meself because I know you'd like me to." He turned, and as he was going out ran into a man who was entering. "Now then!" said a surly voice. "Who are you? O, it's _you_, is it?--I know all about you." "What you know o me?" asked Alf, aggressively. "Why, what a beauty you are." The two men eyed each other truculently. Then Joe barged through the door. The entrance cleared, Alf went out, but as he passed on the pavement outside he beat a rat-tan on the window with insolent knuckles. Joe leaped back to the door and scowled down the road at the back of the little chauffeur retreating at the trot. Alf excelled physically in only one activity: he could run. The engineer returned to the kitchen, savage and smouldering. Ruth, amused at the encounter, met him with kind eyes. There was in this man the quality of the ferocious male she loved. He marched up to her, his head low between his shoulders like a bull about to charge. "Is yon lil snot after you?" he growled, almost menacing. She regarded him with astonishment, amused and yet defensive. "_You're_ not my husband, Mr. Burt," she cried. "_You've_ no grievance whoever has." The engineer retreated heavily. "Hapen not," he answered, surly and with averted eyes. "A coom next though." She looked up, saw his face, and trembled faintly. He prowled to the door without a word, without a look. "Won't you stop for Ern?" she asked. "Nay," he said, and went out. CHAPTER XVI THE GRANDMOTHER Ruth and her mother-in-law frequently met in the steep and curling streets of Old Town as they went about their business. They knew and tacitly ignored each other. But Ernie's children were not to be ignored. They knocked eternally at their granny's heart. When of summer evenings their mother took her little brood to Saffrons Croft and sat with them beneath the elms, her latest baby in her arms, the others clouding her feet like giant daisies, Anne Caspar, limping by on flat feet with her string bag, would be wrung to the soul. She hungered for her grand-children, longed to feel their limbs, and see their bodies, to hold them in her lap, to bathe them, win their smiles, and hear their prattle. Pride, which she mistook for principle, stood between her and happiness.