She slammed the door of the range; smiling, cruel, the school-girl who teases. "I know where your tobacco money goes, old dad," she continued. His mind was far too big and vague and mooning often to be able to encounter successfully the darts his wife occasionally shot into his large carcase. "He's a beautiful boy," was all he now made answer, as he disappeared. Whether the wound he dealt was deliberately given in self-defence, or unconsciously because he had the power over her, his words stung Anne Caspar to the quick. She turned white, and sat down in the lonely kitchen her wrung old hands twisted in her lap, hugging her wound. Then she recovered enough to take reprisals. "Alf's their landlord, now," she cried after him, the snakes in her eyes darting dreadful laughter. Edward Caspar turned in the door. "Anne," he said, "I wish you to pay Ruth's rent in future out of the money my father left you." The voice was mild but there was a note of authority, firm if faint, running through it. Anne rose grimly to her feet, thin as a stiletto, and almost as formidable. "That woman!" He nodded at her down the passage. "My daughter." Anne turned full face. "D'you know she's had a love-child?" she shrilled, discordant as a squeaking wheel. The old gentleman, fumbling at the door of his study, dropped his bearded chin, and beamed at the angry woman, moonwise over his spectacles. "Why shouldn't she?" he asked. There was something crisp, almost curt, in the interrogation. "But she's not respectable!" Again he dropped his chin and seemed to gape blankly. "Why should she be?" he asked. She heard the key turn, and knew that she was locked out for the night. Later she crept in list-slippers to the door and knocked with the slow and solemn knuckles of fate, a calculated pause between each knock. "Alf's going up, Ern's going down," she said, nodding with grim relish. "_Good_-night, old dad." Next evening Joe called at the cottage, to fetch Ernie for the class. He arrived as he sometimes had done of late, a little before Ernie was due home from the yard. At this hour the little ones had already been put to bed; and Ruth would be alone with Alice, between whom and the engineer there had sprung up a singular intimacy ever since the evening on which he had carried her home like a dead thing in his arms from Saffrons Croft. Ruth had not seen him since his clash with Alfred in the door; and he had obviously avoided her. Now she thrilled faintly. Was he in love with her?--she was not sure. He entered without speaking and took his seat as always before the fire, broad-spread and slightly huddled in his overcoat, chin on chest, staring into the fire. Ruth, busy baking, her arms up to the elbow in dough, made her decision swiftly. She would meet him, face him, fight him. "Well, Joe," she said, not looking at him. It was the first time she had called him that.