A few days later Ernie came home immediately after work instead of repairing to the Star. As he entered the room Ruth saw there was something up. He was sober—terribly so.

"I done it, Ruth, old lass," he said.

She knew at once.

"Got the sack?" she asked.

He nodded.

"I\'ve no one to blame only meself," he said, disarming her, as he disarmed everyone by his Christian quality.

Ruth did not reproach him: that was not her way. Nor did she sit down and cry: she had expected the catastrophe too long. She took the boy from the cradle and opened her bodice.

"You shan\'t suffer anyways," she said, half to herself, half to the child, and stared out of the window, babe at breast, rocking gently and with tapping foot.

Ern slouched out; and Ruth was left alone, to face as best she could the spectre that haunts through life the path of the immense majority of the human race. She had watched its slinking approach for years. Now with a patter of hushed feet, dreadful in the fury of its assault, it was on her. Remorseless in attack as in pursuit it was hounding her and hers slowly down a dreary slope to a lingering death, of body and spirit alike, in that hungry morass, the name of which is Unemployment.

Two days later when Joe entered the cottage he found Ruth for once sitting, listless. All the children were in bed, even little Alice. He saw at once why. There was no fire, though it was January.

"Where\'s Ern, then?" he asked.

"Lookin for work," Ruth answered.

Joe stared, aghast.

"Is he out?" he asked.

Ruth rose and turned her shoulder to him.

"Yes. They\'ve stood him off. And I don\'t blame em."

"What for?" Joe was genuinely concerned.

"He didn\'t say. Bad time, I reckon. Only don\'t tell anyone, Joe, for dear\'s sake, else they\'ll stop my credit at the shop—and I\'ll be done."

Her eyes filled and she bit her lip.

"Four of em," she said. "And nothing a week to do it on—let alone the rent" ...

She might hush it up; but the news spread.

Alf, with his ears of a lynx, was one of the first to hear. For a moment he hovered in a dreadful state of trepidation. It was a year and a half since he had stalked his white heifer, bent on a kill, only to be scared away by the presence of that mysterious old man he had found at her side in the heart of the covert. But his lust was by no means dead because it had been for the time suppressed. Ruth had baffled him; and Alf had not forgotten it. Ern possessed a beautiful woman he longed for; and Alf had not forgiven him.

Perhaps because he had beaten down his desire for so long, it now rushed out ravening from its lair, and drove all else before it. Throwing caution to the winds, he came stealing along like a stoat upon the trail, licking his lips, wary yet swift. First he made sure that Ernie was out, looking for a job of work. Then he came down the street.

Ruth met her enemy blithely and with taunting eyes. In battle she found a certain relief from the burthen of her distress. And here she knew was no question of pity or consideration.

"Monday\'s your morning, isn\'t it?" she said. "Come along then, will you, Alf? And you\'ll see what I got for you."

Alf shook a sorrowful head, studying his rent-book.

"It can\'t go on," he said in the highly moral tone he loved to adopt. "It ain\'t right." He raised a pained face and looked away. "Of course if you was to wish to wipe it off and start clean——"

Ruth was cold and smiling. She handled Alf always with the caressing contempt with which a cat handles a mouse.

"Little bit of accommodation," she said. "No thank you, Alf. I shouldn\'t feel that\'d help me to start clean."

"See Ern\'s down and out," continued the tempter in his hushed and confidential voice. "Nobody won\'t give him a job."

Ruth trembled slightly, though she was smiling still and self-contained.

"You\'ll see to that now you\'re on high, won\'t you?" she said—"for my children\'s sake."

"It\'d be doin Ern a good turn, too," Alf went on in the same low monotone.

"Brotherly," said Ruth. "But he mightn\'t see it that way."

"He wouldn\'t mind," continued Alf gently. "See he\'s all for Joe Burt and the classes now. Says you\'re keeping him back. Nothin but a burthen to him, he says. Her and her brats, as he said last night at the Institute. Don\'t give a chap a chance." Alf wagged his head. "Course he shouldn\'t ha said it. I know that. Told him so at the time afore them all. Tain\'t right—I told him straight—your own wife and all."

"My Ern didn\'t say that, Alf," Ruth answered simply.

His eyes came seeking hers furtively, and were gone instantly on meeting them.

"Then you won\'t do him a good turn?"

Ruth\'s fine eyes flashed and danced, irony, laughter, scorn, all crossing swords in their brown deeps. There were aspects of Alf that genuinely amused her.

"Would you like to talk it over with him?" she asked.

"And supposing I have?"

"He\'ll be back in a moment," she said, sweet and bright. "I\'ll ask him."

Alf was silent, fumbling with his watch-chain. Then he began again in the same hushed voice, and with the same averted face.

"And there\'s another thing between us." His eyes were shut, and he was weaving to and fro like a snake in the love-dance. "Sorry you\'re trying to make bad blood between me and my old dad," he said. "Very sorry, Ruth."

"I aren\'t," Ruth answered swiftly. "You was always un-friends from the cradle, you and dad. See he don\'t think you\'re right." She added a little stab of her own—"No one does. That\'s why they keep you on as sidesman, Mr. Chislehurst says. Charity-like. They\'re sorry for you. So\'m I."

The words touched Alf\'s vital spot—the conceit that was the most obvious symptom of his insanity. His face changed, but his voice remained as before, stealthy and insinuating. He came a little closer, and his eyes caressed her figure covetously.

"You see I wouldn\'t annoy me, not too far, not if I was you, Ruth. You can go too far even with a saint upon the cross."

Ruth put out the tip of her tongue daintily.

"Crook upon the cross, don\'t you mean, Alf?"

He brushed the irrelevancy aside, shooting his head across to hers. His face was ugly now, and glistening. With deliberate insolence he flicked a thumb and finger under her nose.

"And I do know what I do know, and what nobody else don\'t know only you and me and the Captin, my tuppenny tartlet."

She was still and white, formidable in her very dumbness. He proceeded with quiet stealth.

"See that letter I wrote you used to hold over against me before you married—that\'s destroyed now. And a good job, too, for it might have meant trouble for Alfured. But it\'s gone! I know that then. Ern tol............