Sim was in debt to his landlord, and over the idea of ejectment from his little dwelling the tailor would brood day and night.  Folks said he was going crazed about it.  None the less was Sim’s distress as poignant as if the grounds for it had been more real.  “Haud thy bletherin’ gab,” Wilson said one day; “because ye have to be cannie wi’ the cream ye think ye must surely be clemm’d.”  Salutary as some of the Scotsman’s comments may have been, it was natural that the change in his manners should excite surprise among the dalespeople.  The good people expressed themselves as “fairly maizelt” by the transformation.  What did it all mean?  There was surely something behind it.

The barbarity of Wilson’s speech was especially malicious when directed against the poor folks with whom he lived, and who, being conscious of how essential he was to the stability of the household, were largely at his mercy.  It happened on one occasion that when Wilson returned to the cottage after a day’s absence, he found Sim’s daughter weeping over the fire.

“What’s now?” he asked.  “Have ye nothing in the kail?”

Rotha signified that his supper was ready.

“Thou limmer,” said Wilson, in his thin shriek, “how long ’ul thy dool last?  It’s na mair to see a woman greet than to see a goose gang barefit.”

Ralph Ray called at the tailor’s cottage the morning after this, and found Sim suffering under violent excitement, of which Wilson’s behavior to Rotha had been the cause.  The insults offered to himself he had taken with a wince, perhaps, but without a retort.  Now that his daughter was made the subject of them, he was profoundly agitated.

“There I sat,” he cried, as his breath came and went in gusts,—­“there I sat, a poor barrow-back’t creature, and heard that old savvorless loon spit his spite at my lass.  I’m none of a brave man, Ralph:  no, I must be a coward, but I went nigh to snatching up yon flail of his and striking him—­aye, killing him!—­but no, it must be that I’m a coward.”

Ralph quieted him as well as he could, telling him to leave this thing to him.  Ralph was perhaps Sim’s only friend.  He would often turn in like this at Sim’s workroom as he passed up the fell in the morning.  People said the tailor was indebted to Ralph for proofs of friendship more substantial than sympathy.  And now, when Sim had the promise of a strong friend’s shoulder to lean on, he was unmanned, and wept.  Ralph was not unmoved as he stood by the forlorn little man, and clasped his hands in his own and felt the warm tears fall over them.

As the young dalesman was leaving the cottage that morning, he encountered in the porch the subject of the conversation, who was entering in.  Taking him firmly but quietly by the shoulder, he led him back a few paces.  Sim had leapt up from his bench, and was peering eagerly through the window.  But Ralph did no violence to his lodger.  He was saying something with marked emphasis, but the words escaped the tailor’s ears.  Wilson was answering nothing.  Loosing his hold of him, Ralph walked quietly away.  Wilson entered the cottage with a livid face, and murmuring, as though to himself,—­