“Why should you bring my hasty words up again’ me now, master, when the lady has been so kind?” said the man with emotion.  “I am humbly grateful to you, Miss; and so is Bess.  We are sensible of the ill-convenience we—­”

Miss Wilson, who had been conferring with the housekeeper, cut his speech short by ordering him to carry his wife to bed, which he did with the assistance of Smilash, now jubilant.  Whilst they were away, one of the servants, bidden to bring some blankets to the woman’s room, refused, saying that she was not going to wait on that sort of people.  Miss Wilson gave her warning almost fiercely to quit the college next day.  This excepted, no ill-will was shown to the refugees.  The young ladies were then requested to return to bed.

Meanwhile the man, having laid his wife in a chamber palatial in comparison with that which the storm had blown about her ears, was congratulating her on her luck, and threatening the children with the most violent chastisement if they failed to behave themselves with strict propriety whilst they remained in that house.  Before leaving them he kissed his wife; and she, reviving, asked him to look at the baby.  He did so, and pensively apostrophized it with a shocking epithet in anticipation of the time when its appetite must be satisfied from the provision shop instead of from its mother’s breast.  She laughed and cried shame on him; and so they parted cheerfully.  When he returned to the hall with Smilash they found two mugs of beer waiting for them.  The girls had retired, and only Miss Wilson and the housekeeper remained.

“Here’s your health, mum,” said the man, before drinking; “and may you find such another as yourself to help you when you’re in trouble, which Lord send may never come!”

“Is your house quite destroyed?” said Miss Wilson.  “Where will you spend the night?”

“Don’t you think of me, mum.  Master Smilash here will kindly put me up ’til morning.”

“His health!” said Smilash, touching the mug with his lips.

“The roof and south wall is browed right away,” continued the man, after pausing for a moment to puzzle over Smilash’s meaning.  “I doubt if there’s a stone of it standing by this.”

“But Sir John will build it for you again.  You are one of his herds, are you not?”

“I am, Miss.  But not he; he’ll be glad it’s down.  He don’t like people livin’ on the land.  I have told him time and again that the place was ready to fall; but he said I couldn’t expect him to lay out money on a house that he got no rent for.  You see, Miss, I didn’t pay any rent.  I took low wages; and the bit of a hut was a sort of set-off again’ what I was paid short of the other men.  I couldn’t afford to have it repaired, though I did what I could to patch and prop it.  And now most like I shall be blamed for letting it be blew down, and shall have to live in half a room in the town and pay two or three shillin’s a week, besides walkin’ three miles to and from my work every day.  A gentleman like Sir John don’t hardly know what the value of a penny is to us laborin’ folk, nor how cruel hard his estate rules and the like comes on us.”