Now, on Sunday afternoon, Lydia, at the garden gate of her brother’s house, started off six children to Sunday school. Five were girls and one was a boy. They ranged from twelve years old to three; while at home a two year old baby—another girl—remained with her mother. Mary Dolbear expected her tenth child during the coming spring. Two had died in infancy. She was an inert, genial mass of a woman, who lived only for her children and the business of maternity. Her husband worshipped her and they increased and multiplied proudly. Their house, but for Lydia’s sleepless ministrations, would have been a pigstye. They were indifferent to dirt and chose to make all things subservient to the demands of their children. “The cradle rules the world, so enough said,” was Tom Dolbear’s argument when people protested at the chaos in which he lived. He was a stout man with a fat, boyish face, scanty, sandy hair and a narrow forehead, always wrinkled by reason of the weakness of his eyes. He had a smile like a baby and was indeed a very childish man; but he knew his business and made his farm suffice for his family needs. In this house Lydia’s own room was an oasis in a wilderness. There one found calm, order, cleanliness, distinction. She trusted nobody in it but herself and always locked the door when she left for work. It was regarded as a sacred room, for both Mary and her husband reverenced Lydia and blessed the Providence that had sent her to them. They treated her with the greatest respect, always gave way to her and recognised very acutely the vital force she represented in the inert and sprawling domesticity of their establishment. Once, when an idea was whispered that Tom’s sister might leave him, Mary fell absolutely ill and refused to eat and drink until she changed her mind and promised to stay. To do them justice they never took Lydia for granted. Their gratitude flowed in a steady stream. They gave her all credit and all admiration, and went their philoprogenitive way with light hearts. Now Mrs. Trivett watched her nieces and nephew march together in their Sunday best along the way to Sunday school. Then she was about to shut the wicket and return up the garden path, when a man appeared on the high road and a fellow worker at the Mill accosted her. Nicholas Pinhey was a finisher; that is to say the paper passed through his hands last before it left the works. With the multifarious processes of its creation he had nothing to do; but every finished sheet and stack of sheets touched his fingers before it entered the world, and he was well skilled in the exacting duties of his own department.