“That’s only just thinking back, though,” Emma replied, returning each of the photographs to its place of woe. “Old folks can’t really do with children in the flesh. They make a deal o’ work, as I said just now, and old folks can’t do with that. They want their bit o’ rest and quiet. You’d find a child real tiresome nowadays, Ann Clapham.” “Not me!” The charwoman flung out her answer with stout scorn. “I was never one to mind a bit o’ noise at any time—nor work neither—and shouldn’t now. I like to hear young things singing and shouting up and down the world. Folks’s barns where I scrub near always look to me for a bit of a lark. And I’m a long way from being an old body yet, even though I’m not as young as I was!” “You’ve aged a deal lately, though—ay, more than a deal!” Emma had finished her setting of her sorrowful prisoners to rights, and was now returned to her post at the table. (Would she _never_ sit? Mrs. Clapham wondered exasperatedly.) “You’re not as lish on your feet for one thing—I’ve noticed that. Think on how you kicked table-leg or summat when you come in. And there’s a look about you I don’t like, same as I’ve seen in a deal of folks as was quick took off. What, there was one day I see you coming back from your job, I was feared you’d drop down dead in the street! Walking dead lame you was, and with your hand on your heart, and as for your face, what, it was the colour o’ putty! I made sure I’d see doctor at your house afore so long, and I was right surprised when he never come. You kept house for a while, though, didn’t you?—ay, so I thought. There’s no denying you were mortal bad.” Again the smooth voice and the black eyes held Mrs. Clapham captive, allowing her no point at which to speak; and again, as she listened, she felt the old trouble at her tiresome heart, and was conscious of the old grumble in her tiresome knee. She was ashamed, in any case, on her beautiful day, to remember that other day of depression and giving-up, but that Emma should know of it made her doubly ashamed. She had forgotten, as she toiled miserably up the empty street, that quite probably Emma would be watching her from some hidden place. She said to herself that, if only she had known it at the time, she would have got home somehow without giving herself away! The thing in itself had been hard enough to bear, setting a dread in her life that she would never afterwards escape; but it made her fear greater and the wound deeper that Emma, of all people, should have seen her shame.