SUDDENLY HOLWOOD STOOPED AND PRESSED HIS LIPS TO HER BROW 59 WINEFRED HAD TAKEN THE LANTERN, AND HELD IT SO AS TO ASSIST HIM 84 JANE MARLEY HAD THRUST HER WAY TO THE FRONT AND WAS NEAR THE AUCTIONEER 139 MR. HOLWOOD APPROACHED THE CHAIR AND INTRODUCED HIMSELF 218 SHE WAS CLASPED IN THE ARMS OF THIS GIRL, HER BURNING CHEEKS WERE KISSED 246 IN A MOMENT SHE WAS IN HIS ARMS, AND THE CAGE AND THE BIRDS HAD FALLEN 262 SHE WAS REMOVING THIS CASE TO DROP IT WHERE THE GOLD HAD FALLEN, WHEN HER ARMS WERE GRASPED FROM BEHIND 297 WINEFRED: A STORY OF THE CHALK CLIFFS CHAPTER I HOMELESS One grey, uncertain afternoon in November, when the vapour-laden skies were without a rent, and the trailing clouds, without a fringe, were passing imperceptibly into drizzle, that thickened with coming night, when the land was colourless, and the earth oozed beneath the tread, and the sullen sea was as lead――on such a day, at such a time of day, a woman wandered through Seaton, then a disregarded hamlet by the mouth of the Axe, picking up a precarious existence by being visited in the summer by bathers. The woman drew her daughter about with her. Both were wet and bedraggled. The wind from the east soughed about the caves, whistled in the naked trees, and hissed through the coarse sea-grass and withered thrift; whilst from afar came the mutter of a peevish sea. The woman was tall, had fine features of a powerful cast, with eyes in which slumbered volcanic fire. Her cheeks were flushed, her rich, dark hair, caught by the wind and sopped by the mist, was dishevelled under her battered hat. She was not above thirty-six years old. The girl she held and drew along was about eighteen. She partook of her mother's fineness of profile and darkness of eye. If there were in her features some promise or threat of the resolution that characterised her mother's countenance, it was tempered by a lurking humour that would not suffer them to set to hardness. This woman, holding her daughter with a grip of iron, stood in the doorway of a farm, talking with, or rather at, the farmer. 'Why not? Have I not hands, arms? Can I not work? Will not she work? Prove us. I ask why you cannot take us in?' 'My good woman, we require no one.'