"I allow you've come to tell me about our Ruth," she said at last. "Have you heard anything?" asked Mrs. Trupp. The other shook her head. "We'd be the last to hear," she said. "That's sure. But I knaw there's been something. It's seven month since she's been anigh us. That's not our maid--our Ruth: so good and kind and considerate for her dad and me as she's always been." "There has been something," answered Mrs. Trupp, and told her tale.... The mother listened in silence, the tears streaming down her face, her hands upon her lap. When the story was finished, she rose. "Thank you kindly, 'm," she said. "If you'll excuse me I'll tell dad. He's in the back." She went out, a big unwieldy woman, walking with the unconscious majesty of grief, and was absent some time. Mrs. Trupp sat in the kitchen with a somnolent rust-coloured cat, and listened to the willows rustling by the stream and the voices of children playing by the bridge. Once she went to the window and looked across the cattle-dotted Brooks to the long low foothill that raises a back like a bow, green now with young corn, against the bleak shaven flanks of old Wind-hover. Then Reuben Boam entered, erect as a soldier, and with the face of a puritan and prophet. Mrs. Trupp wondered, as she often had of late years, why the men of her own class never attained the dignity of the great amongst the simple poor. She rose humiliated, conscious of her own spiritual inferiority; and took his rough paw between her two delicate hands. "Won't you sit down, Boam?" she suggested, quite modern enough to realize what a topsy-turvy world it was in which she should have to make such a request to an old man in his own home. His long bare upper lip trembled and nibbled as he spoke. "She's a good maid," he said huskily--"our Ruth. The Mistus says it were a gentleman. It's hard for a working girl to stand up agen a gentleman that's set on despoilin her. But in my day gentlemen were gentlemen and kept emselves accardin. They tell me it's different now. Accounts for the bit o bitterness, hap." The great hand lying in hers twitched. "She must come back home soon so ever she can move. There's not much. But we'll make out somehow. Rebecca must goo to her. She'll need her mother now. They was always very close--mother and daughter." The old woman entered, tying her bonnet-strings beneath her chin. "Yes, I'll take carrier's cart to Ratton. Then I can walk to the Decoy and take train to the East-end." "Won't you come with me?" said Mrs. Trupp. "I've got the car in the Tye." ... She dropped her companion at the door of the house in Sea-gate, and herself took a tram home. When Mrs. Boam emerged from the house an hour later a car was still at the door. The old lady looked about her, a little bustled. "Could you tell me the way to the tram?" she asked the chauffeur. He touched his hat and smiled. If Alf had a soft spot in his heart, it was for old women.