"Well, good morning, Miss Hilton," he said, opening the door with the stained glass window, and stepping into the red-tiled porch, he looked up at the sky. "I believe it's stopped raining--all the better for your rheumatism, eh? Well! give my love to the neighbours you think so much of," he shouted with a laugh, and shut the door. Anne opened the wooden gate with brass nails, and shutting it behind her stood again in the dripping lane. CHAPTER X The stirring of anger at Richard Burton's callousness gave way almost at once to a feeling of fatigue and defeat as she started on her return home, and a persistent image of Jane, a little girl playing skipping-ropes in red stockings, kept coming before her eyes. One or two gigs passed her, splashing among the pools of the road. The birds began to sing with a clarity as sweet as that of the purified air. There was still a tinkling of running water from every side, but the clouds were in shreds, and patches of blue sky were uncovered here and there. Three-quarters of the way to her home she passed a fair sized cottage, in front of which a tall grey-haired woman was sweeping the standing water from the path with a yard brush. She stopped brushing as she heard footsteps and looked over the gate. "Why, it's Miss Hilton," she exclaimed. "What a wet walk you've had. Come in and stop a bit before you go further," she said, with the eagerness of an active, talkative woman, who had seen no one to speak to all day. She took the drenched umbrella and set it on its end in the doorway, and Anne, tired, hot, and discouraged, sat down gladly on the chair she offered her. It was a comfortable kitchen, full of furniture, and bearing evident signs of men in the house. There were hats hanging behind the door and two guns over the fireplace. Such furniture as was placed there must have been long ago settled in its position. No one could mistake the room for that of young people. There was something in the multitude of worn objects, their solidity, their position in the room, each accommodating the other so that one could think of no other place for any of them, in the polish which had worn into the heart of the wood by constant rubbing which betrayed the presence and passage of many people through the room for many years; a used, comfortable, taken-care-of appearance, very pleasant to feel around one, a room from which one would not easily take oneself away at night and which seemed to Anne Hilton to set around her the company of many cheerful people.