Mrs. Clapham found spirit to murmur “You’re right kind!”—the identical speech that she had been making throughout the day, a sort of continual “Selah” to recurring pæans of praise. Now it seemed as if the very words that composed it could not be quite the same; but then she herself seemed anything but the same. The silver bob of her hair had slipped from its moorings with the shock of her fall; loose hairs strayed across her cheeks, or straggled over the black gown. Her face, drained of its colour, seemed actually to have lost its shape, and wrinkles had come into being that were only the merest guesses before. Her eyes looked blind with age, with weeping, with mental and physical pain. Her hands shook as they wandered from table to chair, or came back to their miserable, fretting movement over her knees.... And yet even in storm and wreck she still looked wholesome and clean, fine even amid dust and tears and the crushing agony of her grief. It was chiefly the splendid buoyancy of the morning that was gone, the happy confidence, the gallant strength. Never again would she look as though she had suddenly been given the earth. Never again would she look like a ship coming homeward in full sail. She roused herself a second time to find Mrs. Tanner hunting for something to serve as a rest. “You’ll be more comfortable-like wi’ summat under your leg,” she was chirping thoughtfully. “Whatever have you been doing to make yourself so lame?” “Nay, I don’t know, I’m sure....” Again she put up her hand and pushed wearily at her hair. It was quite true that for the moment she could not remember how the accident had occurred, so far had the events of the afternoon receded into the past. “I fell in t’ road somewheres,” she added presently, knitting her brows, and Mrs. Tanner, remembering the dust on the black gown, nodded a wise head. Still hunting for a rest, she came at last to the little chair. “This’ll do grand,” she began, picking it up, but Mrs. Clapham put out a hand. “Nay, not that,” she said, quickly, without looking at it. “There’s summat else, likely, but—not that.” “What, it’ll do it no harm, will it?” Mrs. Tanner protested, puzzled. “It’s an old broken thing, I’m sure!” The charwoman turned her head and gazed at it for a moment without speaking, and then—“It’s—it’s t’ babby chair!” she managed to get out chokingly, and burst again into a storm of tears. Backwards and forwards she rocked under the fresh torrent of grief, almost tearing the good black gown with her working, sorrowful hands. “Nay, I couldn’t put foot on it whatever!” she sobbed, shaking her head so that the silver bob slipped further and one of Tibbie’s carefully sewn hooks burst at her throat. “It would seem near like putting my feet on the corpse of the poor lile lass herself!