“Do, please, be careful!”

“What’s that to you?  You hate me bad enough.  Look here—­send the child out of the room and give me a push:  a little one’d do, and you’ll never get a better chance.”

Still she held her breath; and he went on, gazing upwards and apparently speaking to the eaves.

“Not worth it, I suppose you’ll say?—­Don’t you make too sure.  Now if I can get my fingers over the launder, here—­” He worked his way to the right, to the very edge of the sill, and reached sideways and upwards, raising himself higher and higher on tip-toe.  Hetty heard a warning grunted from below.

“No use,” he announced.  “I can’t reach it by six inches.”

“What are you trying to do?” Hetty asked in a low voice, with a hand over her heart.

“Why, there’s a choke here—­dead leaves or something—­and the roof-water’s running down the side of the house.”

She glanced hurriedly about the room, stepped to the fireplace and picked up a poker—­a small one with a crook at the end.  “Will this help?” she asked, passing it out.

“Eh? the very thing!” He took it, and presently she heard it scraping on the pipe in search of the obstruction.  “Cleared it, by Jingo! and that’s famous.”  He lowered himself upon the flat of his broad soles.  “You ought to ha’ been a plumber’s wife.  My! if I had a headpiece like that to think for me—­let alone to look at!”

“Give me back the poker, please.”

“No tricks, now!” He handed it back, chuckled, and lowering himself back to the topmost rung of the ladder, stood in safety.  “You’re as white as a sheet.  Was you scared I’d fall?  Lord, I like to see you look like that! it a’most makes me want to do it again.  Look here—­”

“For pity’s sake—­”

Was the man mad?  And how was it he held her listening to his intolerable talk?  He was actually scrambling up to the sill again, but paused with his eyes on hers.  “It hurts you?  Very well, then, I won’t:  but I owe you something for that slap in the face, you know.”

“You deserved it!” Hetty exclaimed, flushing as she recoiled from terror to unreasonable wrath, and at the same moment hating herself for arguing with him.

“Did I?  Well, I bear ye no malice.  Go slow, and overlook offences—­ that’s William Wright’s way, and I’ve no pride, so I gets it in the end.  Now some men, after being treated like that, would have sat down and wrote a letter to your father about your goings-on.  I thought of it.  Says I, ’It don’t take more than a line from me, and the fat’s in the fire.’  Mind, I don’t say that I won’t, but I ha’n’t done it yet.  And look here—­I’m a journeyman, as you know, and on the tramp for jobs.  I push on for Lincoln this afternoon; and what I say to you before leaving is this—­you’re a lady, every inch.  Don’t you go and make yourself too cheap with that fella.  He’s a pretty man enough, but there ain’t no honesty in him.”