She would have sat there on the oak settle but that Greatorex was holding open the door of an inner room.

“Yo’d better coom into t’ parlor, Miss Cartaret.  It’ll be more coomfortable for you.”

She rose and followed him.  She had been long enough in Garth to know that if you are asked to go into the parlor you must go.  Otherwise you risk offending the kind gods of the hearth and threshold.

The parlor was a long low room that continued the line of the house to its southern end.  One wide mullioned window looked east over the marsh, the other south to the hillside across a little orchard of dwarfed and twisted trees.

To Alice they were the trees of her Paradise and the hillside was its boundary.

Greatorex drew close to the hearth the horsehair and mahogany armchair with the white antimacassar.

“Sit yo’ down and I’ll putt a light to the fire.”

“Not for me,” she protested.

But Greatorex was on his knees before her, lighting the fire.

“You’ll ‘ave wet feet coomin’ over t’ moor.  Cauld, too, yo’ll be.”

She sat and watched him.  He was deft with his great hands, like a woman, over his fire-lighting.

“There—­she’s burning fine.”  He rose, turning triumphantly on his hearth as the flame leaped in the grate.

“Yo’ll let me mak’ yo’ a coop of tae, Miss Cartaret.”

There was an interrogative lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial.  But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what was said.

“Please don’t trouble.”

“It’s naw trooble—­naw trooble at all.  Maaggie’ll ’ave got kettle on.”

He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen.  “Maaggie!  Maaggie!” he called.  “Are yo’ there?  Putt kettle on and bring tae into t’ parlor.”

Alice looked about her while she waited.

Though she didn’t know it, Jim Greatorex’s parlor was a more tolerable place than the Vicarage drawing-room.  Brown cocoanut matting covered its stone floor.  In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets.  The wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period of simplicity.  The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room, the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere enough to be almost beautiful.  Down the white ground of the wall-paper an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between parallel stripes of blue.