Tom’s heart had sunk rather low before he came to Worge. He was always dissatisfied with himself after seeing Thryza. He never seemed able to find anything to say, just because she was the person he liked most in the world to talk to. He felt that he must be very different from the other men who came to see her—for men liked Thyrza—who could make even the buying of a penn’orth of sweets an occasion for artful sally and interesting conversation. That reminded him that he had left all his purchases on the counter. What an unaccountable fool he was! However, he would not go back for them. They must wait till to-morrow. Still, he wished he hadn’t left them. Thyrza would think him silly, and besides he had wanted to give those sweets to his brothers and sisters. He nearly always brought them something when he went into the town. They were all at supper in the kitchen—he could hear their voices. He wondered if his father had come back yet. He had not, for the first question that greeted his entrance was: “Whur’s your faather, Tom?” “I left him at Woods Corner. I’d have thought he’d bin home by now.” “Then you thought silly. ’T’aun’t likely as he’ll come home till they close. You should have stopped along of un.” “I thought I’d better git back home and tell you the news.” “And wot’s that? Have they let you off?” “Not they. A fortnight’s final.” Mrs. Beatup began to cry. She was a large, stout woman with masses of rough grey hair, and a broad, rather childish face, which now looked more like a child’s than ever as it wrinkled up for crying. “Now, mother, doan’t you taake on,” said Ivy, the eldest girl, getting up and putting her arm round her. “It’s a shaame, a hemmed shaame,” sobbed the woman. “No woander as faather’s stopped at Woods Corner. To take our eldest boy as is the prop and stay of the whole of us!” “He aun’t no such thing,” said Ivy, who was a strapping girl—rather like her mother, except that her round face ended in a sharp chin, which gave her an unexpected air of shrewdness. The second girl, Nell, was helping her brother to his supper of pork and cabbage. “No one can say he’s indispensable,” she remarked in rather a pretty, half-educated voice—she was pupil teacher in her second year at the school in Brownbread Street. “There’s Harry just on sixteen, and there’s Juglery and Elphick, and no one can say father isn’t a strong man and able to look after the farm.” “Your faather’s no use. Tom, did you tell them as your faather had bad habits?” “No, I didn’t,” said Tom sulkily, shovelling in the cabbage with his knife. “Then you wur a fool. You know as your faather aun’t himself three nights out of five, and yet you go and say naun about it. How are they to know if you doan’t tell them?” “I wurn’t going to tell all the big folk round Senlac as my faather drinks.”