"Oh, you're all right, mother," said the Matron cheerfully, pushing her gently back to her seat. The old woman mumbled to herself as she sank back into the same stupor, in the midst of which she brooded on her grievance. The other old woman began in a hard, high voice without raising her head: "That's the way they do in this place. Push out the old ones." "Now you two don't begin talking and grumbling," interrupted the Matron decidedly. "You're as well treated as anyone else." At this moment Anne made a movement in the corner where she had stood unnoticed. From every bench withered hands were thrust at her, some grasping her arm, some her mantle, some were held open at her face. "Give me a ha'penny--just a ha'penny!" screamed a dozen old voices. "A ha'penny! Spare a ha'penny!" "Now then," interrupted the Matron, taking two of the women and leading them back to their places. "What good would a ha'penny do to _any_ of you?" She touched two other women, and they retired grumbling to their seats, all except one tall, bony old creature, with a frightful palsy, who kept hold of Anne by the arm, repeating in a voice which was more like an angry scream than the whisper which her deaf ears imagined it to be. "Those other women'll all beg from you. They'd take the bread out of anybody's mouth. Give me a ha'penny Missis, only a ha'penny," and her avaricious, bony hand pinched Anne's arm tightly as though she already clutched the coin. The Matron, using both her own hands, unfastened her hands as she might have done a knot. The old woman shook with rage and palsy, and fell rather than sat down on her seat under the flowering geraniums in the window. "Now, I _knew_ there was somebody strange in the room," said the blind woman. "Just let me have a look at her." She tucked her knitting needles into her apron-string. She had been for many years in the workhouse infirmary, where she knitted and repaired the thick stockings worn by the inmates. She had become a kind of pride of the ward. Beyond the misfortune of her blindness she had no defect, and her mind was alert and cheerful. "She calls it 'looking,'" said the Matron with a laugh. "Just you see her knitting, Miss Hilton. She's re-footing those stockings. See if you can tell where she's patched them." She took up a bright blue stocking from the bench. The blind woman took the other end and felt it carefully. "That's not _my_ work," she said with amused contempt. "It's too like patchwork. Here's mine." Anne took the stocking and looked. "It's beautiful," she said. "I could never have told there was a join." The blind woman's hand touched her arm and wandered slowly upwards, over her face and neck and head. "I've not seen you before, have I?" she said. "No, I don't think I have."