It was Emma who answered her without pause, taking up the gage instantly, and smoothing her own voice still further in order to heighten the contrast with the strident tones. “Eh, now, Martha Jane Fell, you shouldn’t come bursting in like that! ’Tisn’t nice, when folks is in trouble, to come making a stir; and Mrs. Clapham’s heart not what it should be—not by a deal.” Martha Jane tossed her head. “She’ll thank me right enough, bursting or creeping, when she hears what I’ve got to tell!” Emma’s slow-growing smile conveyed a pitying patronage to the untutored savage.... “Ay, well, you know your own business best, of course,” she rebuked her kindly, “but I can’t see how you know much about ours unless you were listening at t’ house door!” The hit was a failure, however, and Martha Jane only laughed. She did not mind being accused of a thing like that. Turning her shoulder upon her with a contemptuous shrug, she addressed herself pointedly to Mrs. Clapham. “I’d like to say, first of all,” she began clearly, “as I’m right sorry about poor Tibbie! I was that done when I heard t’ news, I didn’t know where to turn. I thought a deal o’ the poor lass, though I don’t know as we’d much to do wi’ each other, her and me.” Now it was Emma’s turn to laugh, although in a perfectly ladylike manner. Martha Jane winced, but her head and her voice went defiantly higher. “She was right decent, was Tibbie—eh, and that bonny an’ all! Seems to me, looking back, she was much the same as I was myself ... I don’t set much by other folks’ barns, as a general rule, but if ever I’d had a lass, I’d have liked her to be like yours.” Again Emma laughed her ladylike laugh, and again Martha Jane flushed and winced. Mrs. Clapham’s eyes climbed slowly and dully until they reached the intruder’s face. “You mean kindly, I don’t doubt,” she said in that hard, sullen voice which seemed so strange from her kindly mouth, “but I don’t know as I’m wanting your sympathy, all the same.” Martha Jane wilted a moment at that, and then flamed in the next instant. In spite of her exhilaration, she, too, was obviously on edge. The tears came into her eyes, but she flung them out angrily with a toss of her head. “I’m right sorry, I’m sure,” she said in an injured tone, “to have said I was sorry where it wasn’t wanted! There’s some folks, all the same, as appreciates feeling when they comes across it. Yon time his lordship lost his grandmother, he was glad enough of a pleasant word.” There was a fresh demonstration of scorn at this, though not from Emma, who merely smiled. The usual glove thrown down evoked the usual answer from Mrs. James. “You and your lordships!” she scoffed, from the huddle against the wall. “Seems to me you think o’ nowt else! Anyway, best-looking man at his lordship’s grandmother’s funeral wasn’t his lordship. Everybody said it was Mr. Baines.”