the water, and the children, I ask what right we have to anything we get.  I had some friends in London who were Socialists, and I followed and agreed with them, but here one sees!  Yes, indeed!—­it is too great a risk to let the individual alone when all these lives depend upon him.  Uncle Robert was an eccentric and a miser; and look at the death-rate of the village—­look at the children; you can see how it has crushed the Hardens already.  No, we have no right to it!—­it ought to be taken from us; some day it will be taken from us!”

Aldous Raeburn smiled, and was himself again.  A woman’s speculations were easier to deal with than a woman’s distress.

“It is not so hopeless as that, I think,” he said kindly.  “The Mellor cottages are in a bad state certainly.  But you have no idea how soon a little energy and money and thought sets things to rights.”

“But we have no money!” cried Marcella.  “And if he is miserable here, my father will have no energy to do anything.  He will not care what happens.  He will defy everybody, and just spend what he has on himself.  And it will make me wretched—­wretched.  Look at that cottage to the right, Mr. Raeburn.  It is Jim Hurd’s—­a man who works mainly on the Church Farm, when he is in work.  But he is deformed, and not so strong as others.  The farmers too seem to be cutting down labour everywhere—­of course I don’t understand—­I am so new to it.  Hurd and his family had an awful winter, last winter—­hardly kept body and soul together.  And now he is out of work already—­the man at the Church Farm turned him off directly after harvest.  He sees no prospect of getting work by the winter.  He spends his days tramping to look for it; but nothing turns up.  Last winter they parted with all they could sell.  This winter it must be the workhouse!  It’s heart-breaking.  And he has a mind; he can feel!  I lend him the Labour paper I take in, and get him to talk.  He has more education than most, and oh! the bitterness at the bottom of him.  But not against persons—­individuals.  It is like a sort of blind patience when you come to that—­they make excuses even for Uncle Robert, to whom they have paid rent all these years for a cottage which is a crime—­yes, a crime!  The woman must have been such a pretty creature—­and refined too.  She is consumptive, of course—­what else could you expect with that cottage and that food?  So is the eldest boy—­a little white atomy!  And the other children.  Talk of London—­I never saw such sickly objects as there are in this village.  Twelve shillings a week, and work about half the year!  Oh! they ought to hate us!—­I try to make them,” cried Marcella, her eyes gleaming.  “They ought to hate all of us landowners, and the whole wicked system.  It keeps them from the land which they ought to be sharing with us; it makes one man master, instead of all men brothers.  And who is fit to be master?  Which of us?  Everybody is so ready to take the charge of other people’s lives, and then look at the result!”