Minta Hurd said eagerly that she would join the new straw-plaiting, and went on to throw out a number of hurried, half-coherent remarks about the state of the trade past and present, leaning meanwhile against the table and endlessly drying her hands on the towel she had taken up when her visitors came in.

Her manner was often nervous and flighty in these days.  She never looked happy; but Marcella put it down to health or natural querulousness of character.  Yet both she and the children were clearly better nourished, except Willie, in whom the tubercular tendency was fast gaining on the child’s strength.

Altogether Marcella was proud of her work, and her eager interest in this little knot of people whose lives she had shaped was more possessive than ever.  Hurd, indeed, was often silent and secretive; but she put down her difficulties with him to our odious system of class differences, against which in her own way she was struggling.  One thing delighted her—­that he seemed to take more and more interest in the labour questions she discussed with him, and in that fervid, exuberant literature she provided him with.  Moreover, he now went to all Mr. Wharton’s meetings that were held within reasonable distance of Mellor; and, as she said to Aldous with a little laugh, which, however, was not unsweet, he had found her man work—­she had robbed his candidate of a vote.

Wharton listened a while to her talk with Minta, smiled a little, unperceived of Marcella, at the young mother’s docilities of manner and phrase; then turned his attention to the little hunched and coughing object by the fire.

“Are you very bad, little man?”

The white-faced child looked up, a dreary look, revealing a patient, melancholy soul.  He tried to answer, but coughed instead.

Wharton, moving towards him, saw a bit of ragged white paper lying on the ground, which had been torn from a grocery parcel.

“Would you like something to amuse you a bit—­Ugh! this smoke!  Come round here, it won’t catch us so much. Now, then, what do you say to a doggie,—­two doggies?”

The child stared, let himself be lifted on the stranger’s knee, and did his very utmost to stop coughing.  But when he had succeeded his quick panting breaths still shook his tiny frame and Wharton’s knee.

“Hm—­Give him two months or thereabouts!” thought Wharton.  “What a beastly hole!—­one room up, and one down, like the other, only a shade larger.  Damp, insanitary, cold—­bad water, bad drainage, I’ll be bound—­bad everything.  That girl may well try her little best.  And I go making up to that man Boyce!  What for?  Old spites?—­new spites?—­which?—­or both!”

Meanwhile his rapid skilful fingers were tearing, pinching, and shaping; and in a very few minutes there, upon his free knee, stood the most enticing doggie of pinched paper, a hound in full course, with long ears and stretching legs.