Three-quarters of the way to her home she passed a fair sized cottage, in front of which a tall grey-haired woman was sweeping the standing water from the path with a yard brush.  She stopped brushing as she heard footsteps and looked over the gate.

“Why, it’s Miss Hilton,” she exclaimed.  “What a wet walk you’ve had.  Come in and stop a bit before you go further,” she said, with the eagerness of an active, talkative woman, who had seen no one to speak to all day.  She took the drenched umbrella and set it on its end in the doorway, and Anne, tired, hot, and discouraged, sat down gladly on the chair she offered her.

It was a comfortable kitchen, full of furniture, and bearing evident signs of men in the house.  There were hats hanging behind the door and two guns over the fireplace.  Such furniture as was placed there must have been long ago settled in its position.  No one could mistake the room for that of young people.  There was something in the multitude of worn objects, their solidity, their position in the room, each accommodating the other so that one could think of no other place for any of them, in the polish which had worn into the heart of the wood by constant rubbing which betrayed the presence and passage of many people through the room for many years; a used, comfortable, taken-care-of appearance, very pleasant to feel around one, a room from which one would not easily take oneself away at night and which seemed to Anne Hilton to set around her the company of many cheerful people.

Mrs Crowther was too much occupied with her own affairs, and too eager to talk to enquire what had brought Anne Hilton that way.  She was a tall, spare, robust woman, the mother of nine children, all grown up and well placed.  She was a “worker.”  She had considered the bearing and rearing of her children as a piece of work to be done, in the same way in which she looked upon the spring-cleaning of her house.  It had been done to her satisfaction, and done well.  She had had little time for sentiment in her married life, but now, still active, strong, and with only the work of her house and garden, the meals for her four sons who still lived at home, and their mending and washing, she had leisure to express her opinions, and always having been obliged to hold her imagination within the visible realities of life and death, with which all her life had been concerned, she had arrived at a definiteness of judgment, and an honesty of speech which one frequently finds among women of her class out of reach of poverty, but not beyond the necessity of work.  Her husband was not a country man, but had come from a town florist’s to work with a nurseryman about two miles distant.  She began to tell Anne Hilton how they had first come to the country.