‘Well, that is a God-forsaken hole!’ said Langham, studying it, his interest roused at last, rather perhaps by the Ruysdael-like melancholy and picturesqueness of the scene than by its human suggestiveness. ‘I could hardly have imagined such a place existed in southern England. It is more like a bit of Ireland.’ ‘If it were Ireland it might be to somebody’s interest to ferret it out,’ said Robert bitterly. ‘But these poor folks are out of the world. They may be brutalized with impunity. Oh, such a case as I had here last autumn! A young girl of sixteen or seventeen, who would have been healthy and happy anywhere else, stricken by the damp and the poison of the place, dying in six weeks, of complications due to nothing in the world but preventable cruelty and neglect? It was a sight that burnt into my mind, once for all, what is meant by a landlord’s responsibility. I tried, of course, to move her, but neither she nor her parents--elderly folk--had energy enough for a change. They only prayed to be let alone. I came over the last evening of her life to give her the communion. “Ah, sir!” said the mother to me--not bitterly--that is the strange thing, they have so little bitterness! “If Mr. ‘Enslowe would just ‘a mended that bit o’ roof of ours last winter, Bessie needn’t have laid in the wet so many nights as she did, and she coughin’ fit to break your heart, for all the things yer could put over’er.”’ Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry a few minutes before, tremulous with feeling, ‘Ah, well,’ he said at last with a long breath, moving away from the parapet of the bridge on which he had been leaning, ‘better be oppressed than oppressor any day! Now, then, I must deliver my stores. There’s a child here Catherine and I have been doing our best to pull through typhoid.’ They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading to the hamlet. Some planks carried them across the ditch, the main sewer of the community, as Robert pointed out, and they made their way through the filth surrounding one of the nearest cottages. A feeble, elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow, bloodless skin made him look much older than he actually was, opened the door and invited them to come in. Robert passed on into an inner room, conducted thither by a woman who had been sitting working over the fire. Langham stood irresolute, but the old man’s quavering ‘Kindly take a chair Sir; you’ve come a long way,’ decided him, and he stepped in.