“Well, folks, I s’pose I must be wishing ’ee good-bye.”  He meant to speak cheerfully, but over-acted, and was hilarious instead.  Recognising this, he blushed.

“We’ll meet in heaven, I daresay,” the woman answered.  “I put the door-key, as you saw, under the empty geranium-pot ’pon the window-ledge; an’ whoever the new tenant’s wife may be, she can eat off the floor if she’s minded.  Now drive along, that’s a good soul, and leave us to fend for ourselves.”

They watched him out of sight before either stirred.  The last decisive step, the step across the Workhouse threshold, must be taken with none to witness.  If they could not pass out of their small world by the more reputable mode of dying, they would at least depart with this amount of mystery.  They had left the village in Farmer Lear’s cart, and Farmer Lear had left them in the high road; and after that, nothing should be known.

“Shall we be moving on?” Jan asked at length.  There was a gate beside the road just there, with a small triangle of green before it, and a granite roller half-buried in dock-leaves.  Without answering, the woman seated herself on this, and pulling a handful of the leaves, dusted her shoes and skirt.

“Maria, you’ll take a chill that’ll carry you off, sitting ’pon that cold stone.”

“I don’t care.  ‘Twon’t carry me off afore I get inside, an’ I’m going in decent, or not at all.  Come here, an’ let me tittivate you.”

He sat down beside her, and submitted to be dusted.

“You’d as lief lower me as not in their eyes, I verily believe.”

“I always was one to gather dust.”

“An’ a fresh spot o’ bacon-fat ’pon your weskit, that I’ve kept the moths from since goodness knows when!”

Old Jan looked down over his waistcoat.  It was of good “West-of-England broadcloth, and he had worn it on the day when he married the woman at his side.

“I’m thinking—­” he began.

“Hey?”

“I’m thinking I’ll find it hard to make friends in—­in there.  ’Tis such a pity, to my thinking, that by reggilations we’ll be parted so soon as we get inside.  You’ve a-got so used to my little ways an’ corners, an’ we’ve a-got so many little secrets together an’ old-fash’ned odds an’ ends o’ knowledge, that you can take my meaning almost afore I start to speak.  An’ that’s a great comfort to a man o’ my age.  It’ll be terrible hard, when I wants to talk, to begin at the beginning every time.  There’s that old yarn o’ mine about Hambly’s cow an’ the lawn-mowing machine—­I doubt that anybody ’ll enjoy it so much as you always do; an’ I’ve so got out o’ the way o’ telling the beginning—­which bain’t extra funny, though needful to a stranger’s understanding the whole joke—­that I ’most forgets how it goes.”

“We’ll see one another now an’ then, they tell me.  The sexes meet for Chris’mas-trees an’ such-like.”

“I’m jealous that ‘twon’t be the same.  You can’t hold your triflin’ confabs with a great Chris’mas-tree blazin’ away in your face as important as a town afire.”