Turrif’s wife opened the door, and Trenholme disburdened himself and went and sat by the bed.  The little children were about, as usual, in blue gowns; he had made friends in the house since his first supper there, so they stood near now, and laughed at him a great deal without being afraid.  In the long large wooden room, the mother and eldest girl pursued the housework of the morning tranquilly.  Turrif lay upon a bed in one corner.  The baby’s cradle, a brown box on rockers, was close to the bed, and when the child stirred the father put out his hand and rocked it.  The child’s head was quite covered with the clothes, so that Trenholme wondered how it could breathe.  He sat by the foot of the bed, and Turrif talked to him in his slow English.

“You are wise to go—­a young man and genteel-man like you.”

“I know you think I was a fool to take the place, but a man might as well earn his bread-and-butter while he is looking round the country.”

“You have looked round at this bit of country for two months”—­with a shrug of the shoulders.  “I should have sought your bright eyes could see all what sere is to see in two days.”

“You’ll think me a greater fool when you know where I am going.”

“I hope” (Turrif spoke with a shade of greater gravity on his placid face)—­“I hope sat you are going to some city where sere is money to be made, and where sere is ladies and other genteel-men like you.”

“I knew you would think me mad.  I’m going to Bates’s clearing to cut down his trees.”

“Why?” The word came with a certain authority.

“You would almost be justified in writing to the authorities to lock me up in an asylum, wouldn’t you?  But just consider what an awful condition of loneliness that poor wretch must be in by this time.  You think I’ve been more alone than’s good for me; think of him, shut up with an old woman in her dotage.  He was awfully cut up about this affair of old Cameron and the girl, and he is losing all his winter’s lumbering for want of a man.  Now, there’s a fix, if you will, where I say a man is to be pitied.”

“Yes,” said Turrif, gravely, “it is sad; but sat is hees trouble.”

“Look here:  he’s not thirty miles away, and you and I know that if he isn’t fit to cut his throat by this time it isn’t for want of trouble to make him, and you say that that state of things ought to be only his own affair?”

“Eh?”

“Well, I say that you and I, or at least I, have something to do with it.  You know very well I might go round here for miles, and offer a hundred pounds, and I couldn’t get a single man to go and work for Bates; they’re all scared.  Well, if they’re scared of a ghost, let them stay away; but I’m not frightened, and I suppose I could learn to chop down trees as well as any of them.  He’s offered good wages; I can take his wages and do his work, and save him from turning into a blethering idiot.”