“If I’d got the time,” he called in to Patience, “I would give the gate a coat of paint.”

“I wish you could,” she called back, “and the front door, too, it’d be the better for it.  To a stranger, I dare say it’ll look shabby.”

Evidently they expected the new-comer to be a very critical little person.

“I can whitewash the back porch,” thought Thomas, “and I’ll do it without saying anything to mother.  It will be a bit of a surprise to her.”

But while he was putting on the last brushful or two, a thought came to him which sent him hurrying into the house in quite a flurry.

“Mother!” he called up the stairs, “mother! we don’t know when she’s coming, Lizzie didn’t say—­and what’s to prevent her coming to-day?”

Patience dropped her scrubbing-brush and sat down on the top stair, overcome with excitement and surprise.  “To-day! this very day!  Oh dear! oh dear! how careless of Lizzie not to tell us!  The poor child might come at any time, and nobody be there to meet her, and we can’t write and ask, for she didn’t give us any address to write to.  Lizzie did use to have some sense before she took up with that Harry Lang, but now—­”

Patience lapsed into silence because she could not find words which would sufficiently express her feelings.  She was tired and irritable too, and she never could endure uncertainty.

Thomas had been standing by all this while, thinking deeply.  “Well,” he said at last, “it’s my belief she’d send her off as soon as she could after she’d wrote the letter, for if Lizzie had a hard thing to do, she was one as couldn’t stop to think much about it, or she’d never do it at all.  She’s put London on the top of her letter, and the London train comes in at four-fifteen, and I’m thinking I’d better go and meet it, any way, and then, if the child don’t come by it, I can tell Station-Master I’m expecting my little grandchild, but I don’t know exactly when, and when she do come, will he keep her safe if I ain’t there in time.  I can’t think of nothing better than that.”

Patience rose briskly, with a look of relief on her face.  There was something very wonderful in the thought that before another night she might be holding her own little grandchild in her arms.  “What a head-piece you have got, father!” she cried admiringly.  “Well, I mustn’t stay here talking, or I shan’t be ready.  If I’d got the time I’d have whitened the ceiling and put a clean pretty paper on the walls of the little room.”

“Little room!—­are—­are you giving her—­Lizzie’s room?” There was a note of shock or dismay in Thomas’s voice.

“Yes,” said Patience shortly.  “The child must have a room, of course, and there isn’t any other!” she answered shortly, because it hurt her to say what she had to, and she knew it would hurt Thomas even more to hear it.  Lizzie’s little bedroom had never been looked into by him since Lizzie had run away and left them, and Patience herself had only gone in now and then, when, for the sake of her own pride in her cottage, and to prevent her neighbour’s comments, the window had to be cleaned and a fresh muslin blind put up.