"Where is that stone? My knife is rusty and blunt. I left it all night in Margaret Dawson's garden, when I cut the lilacs for her."

The frightful calmness with which he uttered her name the sound of the knife being sharpened on the stone-the sense of the utter lovelessness of her heart towards him, seemed all at the same instant to rouse the poor wife's terror to madness.

She rose up suddenly, with white lips and wild eyes, stared round her, and rushed shrieking from the door.

She flew, not towards the town, but away from it, to the other side of the cliff, down its steep, jagged side and along the quiet shore.

With the sea beside her and the thickset stars above her, the poor half-maddened creature had rushed till her limbs had failed her, and she fell as and where Elizabeth found her.

"And those blessed babes," sobbed the widow ; "never shall I forget the sight to my dying day.

Let me go and fetch 'em. I know we both want to kiss 'em over again for it."

But before letting her go Margaret clung to her, and looking into her eyes, with her own streaming and kindling with a large pity, breathed rather than said

"O Elizabeth! Elizabeth! What-what has become of him?”

Who?" asked the widow, trying to conceal the anxiety with which she waited for her answer.

66

'Who, Elizabeth? Who should I mean but Hector ?"

"Thank God!" cried the widow, joyfully, clapping her hands; "all will come well. She thinks of him first. I'll go and fetch the blessed darlings to kiss her this minute, that I will!"

CHAPTER IV.

THE NEW MAN AT PLUGGER'S.

A LITTLE town of crowded brick houses, packed closely together, as if the builders had been aware that the whole country side belonged by rights to corn and hops, and were half-ashamed of intruding there at all; a little town with no shops worth mentioning, no white villas, no treesheltered mansions; but only a huddled mass of bricks and mortar in the shape of houses, ungainly, unornamented, empty-looking; as if everybody who lived there went out to work, leaving the children to take care of themselves which they do by balancing their bodies on the sills of the long blindless windows, hallooing to the trains as they go trailing and thundering past; this little town, with its church on a hill

behind it-looking just mellow and moss-grown and retired as the town itself is raw-looking, naked, and crowded-is Bletwich, on the Alwy.

As the clock of the church tolled six one summer's evening, years before the trains began to run past Bletwich, the workmen of Abraham Plugger, shipwright, gathered together from the yards and creaking little jetty, and came towards the town, as usual, in two separate groups.

Of these two groups the first consisted of Plugger's regular, steady-going elder workmen, who carried home over their shoulders their toolbaskets full of shavings for their wives to light the fire with, and whose words to each other as they toiled homewards in the heat and glare of the harvest weather were few and far between. The second group consisted of Plugger's boys, who always walked together, taking much longer strides and more manly pulls at their pipes than did their elders, and showing a much greater amount of swagger and consequence than those

in advance of them had sufficient energy and strength remaining in them to show.

On this fine August evening there were two stragglers walking between the boys and men.

One was a young man who had for several years belonged to the group consisting of the hard smokers and swaggerers, but who had lately married, and had this evening ventured for the first time to fill his tool-basket with shavings, for which proceeding he was being joked unmercifully by Plugger's boys-so unmercifully, indeed, that he had escaped from amongst them, and yet had not courage to take his place amongst Plugger's elders, who did not fail now and then to throw a dry joke over their shoulders at him

-a joke which was sure to be caught up and enlarged upon by the boys. He took it all, however, with a sort of desperate good-humour, and jogged along between the two fires with a dogged smile on his good-looking, boyish face.

The other straggler was the new man, who