Blenkiron came out and looked at him sulkily.

“I’ll shoe t’ maare,” he said, “but yo’ll stand outside t’ smithy, Jim Greatorex.”

For answer Jim rode the mare into the smithy and dismounted there.

Then Blenkiron spoke.

“You’d best ‘ave staayed where yo’ were.  But yo’ve coom in an’ yo’ s’all ‘ave a bit o’ my toongue.  To-morra’s yore weddin’ day, I ’ear?”

Jim intimated that if it was his wedding day it was no business of Blenkiron’s.

“Wall,” said the blacksmith, “ef they dawn’t gie yo’ soom roough music to-morra night, it’ll bae better loock than yo’ desarve—­t’ two o’ yo’.”

Greatorex scowled at his kinsman.

“Look yo’ ‘ere, John Blenkiron, I warn yo’.  Any man in t’ Daale thot speaaks woon word agen my wife ’e s’all ’ave ’is nack wroong.”

“An’ ’ow ‘bout t’ women, Jimmy?  There’ll bae a sight o’ nacks fer yo’ t’ wring, I rackon.  They’ll ‘ave soomat t’ saay to ’er, yore laady.”

“T’ women?  T’ women?  Domned sight she’ll keer for what they saay.  There is n’ woon o’ they bitches as is fit t’ kneel in t’ mood to ’er t’ tooch t’ sawle of ’er boots.”

Blenkiron peered up at him from the crook of the mare’s hind leg.

“Nat Assy Gaale?” he said.

“Assy Gaale?  ’Oo’s she to mook ’er naame with ’er dirty toongue?”

“Yo’ll not goa far thot road, Jimmy.  ‘Tis wi’ t’ womenfawlk yo’ll ‘aave t’ racken.”

He knew it.

The first he had to reckon with was Maggie.

Maggie, being given notice, had refused to take it.

“Yo’ can please yoresel, Mr. Greatorex.  I can goa.  I can goa.  But ef I goa yo’ll nat find anoother woman as’ll coom to yo’.  There’s nat woon as’ll keer mooch t’ work for yore laady.”

“Wull yo’ wark for ’er, Maaggie?” he had said.

And Maggie, with a sullen look and hitching her coarse apron, had replied remarkably: 

“Ef Assy Gaale can wash fer er I rackon I can shift to baake an’ clane.”

“Wull yo’ waait on ’er?” he had persisted.

Maggie had turned away her face from him.

“Ay, I’ll waait on ’er,” she said.

And Maggie had stayed to bake and clean.  Rough and sullen, without a smile, she had waited on young Mrs. Greatorex.

* * * * *

But Alice was not afraid of Maggie.  She was not going to admit for a moment that she was afraid of her.  She was not going to admit that she was afraid of anything but one thing—­that her father would die.

If he died she would have killed him.

Or, rather, she and Greatorex would have killed him between them.

This statement Ally held to and reiterated and refused to qualify.

For Alice at Upthorne had become a creature matchless in cunning and of subtle and marvelous resource.  She had been terrified and tortured, shamed and cowed.  She had been hounded to her marriage and conveyed with an appalling suddenness to Upthorne, that place of sinister and terrible suggestion, and the bed in which John Greatorex had died had been her marriage bed.  Her mind, like a thing pursued and in deadly peril, took instantaneously a line.  It doubled and dodged; it hid itself; its instinct was expert in disguises, in subterfuges and shifts.