He sucked at his pipe for a moment or two, still fixing his unwinking gaze upon her; finally, he enquired in a stern and disapproving tone what she supposed would become of their daughter and her children in the meantime. “Well, that’s just it,” said Mrs Bolt gently. “’Tis that what brought our Alice here to-day.” The farmer grunted without speaking. “The journey to Ameriky ’ull take every single shillin’ Ned Blanchard can scrape together,” she continued. “He be a-goin’ to send Alice an’ the childern to the workhouse I d’ ’low,” remarked Mr Bolt, hitching his chair a little nearer to the hearth and holding up one foot to the blaze. “He be a-goin’ to scuttle off wi’ hisself to Ameriky an’ leave his wife an’ family on the rates.” “Nay now, nay now,” protested Mrs Bolt in a soothing tone. “You’d never be the one to allow that, Bolt, you know you wouldn’t.” “Me!” said Bolt, turning round with an expression of great surprise. “What have I got to do wi’ it?” “Why, ye know very well, my dear, you’d be the last to let sich shame overtake your own flesh an’ blood. If Ned was once away, you wouldn’t ha’ no objections to your own daughter a-comin’ back here for a while, an’ your own grandchildern, would ye? They’d bring a bit o’ life about this place, an’ it ’ud be nice to have our Alice goin’ about the house again.” There was a silence; Mr Bolt stirred up the contents of his pipe with the end of a match and lit it again. “Little Abel be wonderful like his mother in his ways,” went on Mrs Bolt; “the very moral o’ what she used to be at his age. There’s her little chair in the corner, look-see. He found it out to-day an’ fetched it over aside o’ your chair, an’ sat hisself down in it—there, I declare for a minute I thought our Alice was a child again.” Mr Bolt squinted round at the chair, but did not commit himself by speech. He was not an imaginative man, nevertheless the vision rose before him of the curly-headed child who used to sit in that chair, and whom he had loved as the apple of his eye. His wife put his thoughts into words. “Ye mind our Alice, how pleased she used to be when ye called her over of an evening? Dear to be sure, what a bonny little maid she was, and what a pride we used to take in her. And now to think that poor creetur’ what come here to-day is her. There, I could ha’ cried to see her in that wold patched dress—’ees, an’ I did cry when she did tell I how she do often go hungry.” “Well, I’m dalled if she shall go hungry while she bides wi’ us,” cried the farmer, sitting suddenly upright in his chair. “Let Master Ned emmygrate so soon as he pleases, an’ let the poor maid come to us—an’ the brats too. She’ll know what ’tis for a while, to eat wi’out stintin’. Let her come an’ bide so long as she likes—the longer the better, say I—the longer she’s shut o’ that n’er-do-weel o’ a husband the better pleased I’ll be.”