“I look a fool all right,” he said. “I’m not such a sand-blind sort of man that I don’t know very well what I look like. People always laugh at a chap in my fix. Let ’em. Perhaps I shall laugh too presently. The difference between me and that man is that I can stand a bit of laughter; but he couldn’t. Laughter would kill him. He’d stand up to blame and hard words and curses. He likes ’em—he told me so—because it shows his ideas go deep and fret people’s accepted opinions. Every reformer must make enemies, or he’s not doing his job right—so he said to Knox one day, and I heard him. But laughter and scorn and contempt—that’s different.” They reached Ned’s house and, for his sake, set about their painful task with resolution. “It’s like as if we was going through a dead woman’s things,” whispered Daisy to Mrs. Trivett and the elder agreed. “She is dead as far as poor Ned’s concerned,” she answered. “And if anything on earth could shame her to death, surely it will be to see all her clothes and everything she’s got in the world waiting for her when she arrives.” Daisy, however, argued for her friend while they collected her garments and tied them in brown paper parcels. “I don’t want to say a word against Mr. Dingle, but all the same no such dreadful thing could have happened if he’d been the right one. There’s always two sides to every trouble and there must be excuses that we don’t know about.” Mrs. Trivett admitted this. “There’s always excuses for everybody that we don’t know about, Daisy. We all do things we can’t explain—good as well as bad; and if we can’t explain ourselves to ourselves, then it’s right and reasonable as we shouldn’t be too sure we can explain other people.” They made parcels of everything that belonged to Medora, then Ned brought to them a work-box, two pictures in frames and a sewing-machine. “These have all got to go also,” he said. “And this lot you’d better give her when you see her. It’s her trinkrums and brooches and such like.” He gave Mrs. Trivett a little box which she put in her pocket without speaking. Another woman joined them. She was Ned’s old aunt, who had come to him to keep his house as long as he should remain in it. She talked venomously of Medora. Presently they carried the parcels down the lane to the foot of the hill and left them at “The Waterman’s Arms,” in a little parlour on one side of the entrance. Then Ned went home and Daisy Finch and Mrs. Trivett returned to Dene. There the girl left Lydia, and the latter, after a cup of tea with a neighbour, prepared to climb the Corkscrew Hill and return to Cornworthy. Then it was that she found a man waiting for her and Philander Knox appeared. “I knew your movements,” he said, “and I knew that you’d be setting out for the farm just about now, so I thought as I’d keep you company up the hill. For I always find, going up the Corkscrew, that it’s easier travelled in company.” She was gratified.