Obliging with the obligingness of the man who is scared to death, Alf produced his book. Joe, lowering still, examined it. Then he paid the money into the other's hand. That done he escorted Alf policemanwise to the bottom of Borough Lane. "If A find you mouchin round here again A'll break your bloody little back across ma knee," he told the other, shouldering over him. "A mean it, sitha!" Alf withdrew up the hill towards the _Star_. At a safe distance he paused and called back confidentially, his face white and sneering, "Quite the yard-dog, eh? Bought her, ain't yer?" Joe returned to the cottage and entered. At the head of the stairs a lovely little figure in a white gown that enfolded her hugely like a cloud, making billows about the woolly red slippers which had been Bess Trupp's Christmas gift, smiled at him. "Uncle Joe," little Alice chirped, "please tell Mum I are ready." He ran up the stairs, gathered her in his arms, and bore her back to bed in the room where Susie and Jenny already slept. "Hush!" she whispered, laying a tiny finger on his lips--"The little ones!" He tucked her up and kissed her. "You're the proper little mother, aren't you?" he whispered. In the kitchen he found Ruth, a row of tin-tacks studding her lips, soling Alice's boots. The glint of steel between her lips, and the inward curl of her lips, gave her a touch of unusual grimness. "Always at it," he said. "Yes," she answered between muffled lips. "Got to be. Snob this time. Only the soles are rotten. It's like puttin nails into wet brown paper." She was suffering terribly--he felt it; and suppressed accordingly. But if her furnaces were damped down, he could hear the flames roaring behind closed doors; and her passion, which typified for him the sufferings of those innocent millions to the redemption of whom he had consecrated his life, moved him profoundly. He flung the bag on the table before her almost savagely. It jingled as it fell and squatted there, dowdy, and lackadaisical as a dumpling in a swoon. Ruth eyed it, her lips still steel-studded. "How much?" she mumbled. "Ten pound," he answered. "That's not what I mean." "What _do_ you mean, then?" "What's the price?" He glared at her; then thumped the table with a great fist. "Nothin then!" he shouted. "What doest' take me for?" She munched her tin-tacks sardonically, regarding him. How sturdy he was, with his close curly black hair, and on his face the set and resolute look of the man approaching middle-age, who knows that he wants and how to win it! "A man, Joe." He snorted sullenly. "Better'n a no-man any road," he sneered. The words stung her. All the immense and tender motherliness of her nature rose up like a wave that curls in roaring majesty to a fall. She swept the tin-tacks from her mouth and met him, flashing and glorious. "See here, Joe!" she cried, deep-voiced as a bloodhound. "Ne'er a word against my Ern! I won't have it." "_Your_ Ern!"