The hum of good-natured clack, of bubbling irrepressible life, that note which is peculiarly the note of a growing family and which was characteristic of Hember, had sunk to the merest suggestion of a sound. The younger girls, having stayed away from school, showed by an inclination to bicker that they missed their regular routine of work. Gray, absorbed in her own affairs, was silent; while Richbell, who had been trimming a hat and found her mother’s fingers were needed to give the smartening touch, sat staring at the unsatisfactory result of her industry. As the evening wore on, one by one, the children slipped cheerlessly away to bed. Gray, who had lighted a fire in the parlour, went to sit there with her sweetheart and, upon the usually pleasant kitchen, settled an unsatisfactory hush. "’Tis time mammy was home," said Richbell as the rain of a sudden shower beat on the window and went singing on across the shelterless land. Tom, who had been nodding over the newspaper, looked at his feet. "If I ’adn’t took off me boots, I’d go down and fetch ’er." He was a man of medium height who spoke slowly, fetching up his words like water from a well, fetching them, too, with considerable creaking of the machinery. In appearance he was spare and hard, with a Viking moustache and close dark hair which fitted to his skull like a cap. His wisdom being only of the heart he was likely to remain in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. His wife could rely on him for counsels of moderation, she could rely also on an affection which, like home-brewed, was good from the froth to the dregs. "I can hear steps," cried Richbell, her discontented face brightening and, as she spoke, Mrs. Tom, the raindrops shining on the wool of her bonnet, her cheeks flushed by the quick walk uphill, came in. "Oh, mammy," said the girl in tones that were themselves a welcome, "we thought you was lost." Tom laid aside the _Cornishman_. "Just thinking you was pisky-laid’n," he said, with the smile on which she had rested her heart content for many a year. So glad was she of it after the discomfort, the hinted mystery of the evening that, as she passed his chair, she pressed her cheek for a moment against his. He responded by catching and pulling her down upon his knee. "Take and sit down ’ere a minute," he said, in his most cheerful tone. Mrs. Tom was a busy creature, strong to work and to manage and it was not often that her spirit flagged, that she showed the need of a stay. "Now tell us all what you bin doing." From the room beyond, Gray and Jim, their love-dreams shattered by the sound of an arrival, came to round out the circle. They had been sitting in the firelight, discussing the projected journey to Plymouth and the disagreeable ways of Uncle Leadville. It did not surprise them to find Mrs. Tom throned on her Jim’s knee, for they believed in the permanency of ’sweet-hearting.’ What were twenty years?