Emma’s voice fell smooth as an oiled hand across her passionate twitters and chirps. “No need for you to put yourself about over that, Mrs. Tanner,” she observed quietly. “I’ll be going with her myself, seeing the children is coming to me.” The information conveyed nothing to her hearers at first, and then slowly into their faces came wonder, followed sharply by terror. Into Mrs. Dunn’s, indeed, there came naked horror—Mrs. Dunn, who knew only too well what it was like to deliver a loved one into alien arms. “Coming to her?” Mrs. Airey demanded fiercely, her motherly face suddenly peaked and sharp; and “Nay, now, she never means—!” shrilled Mrs. Dunn, in the voice that usually was so tired and flat. Mrs. Tanner nodded a portentous head. “Ay, but that’s just what she does mean, and no mistake about it!” she explained loudly. She spoke roughly, brutally, almost—almost in a shout, as if the words were clubs with which she battered at Mrs. Clapham. “She sticks to it Ann’s agreed to let her have Tibbie’s barns.” “Nay, now ... nay, never now! ... she mustn’t then ... she just can’t!...” The words seemed to come helter-skelter out of any mouth that opened to fling them first, an almost unintelligible chorus which yet managed to convey volumes. The women actually huddled against the wall, like sheep huddled before some dog. And then, just as the outcry seemed to be dying away, they began again—“Nay, now ... nay never now ... she mustn’t then ... she just can’t!” This distinctly uncomplimentary outburst seemed, however, to have no effect upon Emma. “Mrs. Clapham can’t take ’em herself,” she condescended to explain, the calmness of her attitude making, as it were, an impertinence of the scene before. “There’s yon almshouse, you’ll think on—she can’t go taking the children there; so what wi’ one thing and another, they’ll be bound to come to me.... That’s the way of it, isn’t it, Ann Clapham?” she finished, turning to Tibbie’s mother; and Tibbie’s mother said “Ay,” staring immovably at the floor. This final vindication, this triumph in the teeth of those whom she knew for her sworn foes, was perhaps a little too much for the careful Emma. Loosing her hold on her caution by ever so little, she allowed herself what proved to be a mistaken pleasure. “Likely you’ve summat agen it?” she inquired of the women, her eyes shining with unmistakable malice.