“Just as usual?” she echoed dully.  “Mother and the girls, you mean?”

“Yes:  the Rector is in his study.  I have not seen him to-day:  only the mistress has seen him.”  He paused:  Hetty shivered.  She was weak and woefully tired:  for, excepting a lift at Marton and a second in a wagon from Gainsborough to Haxey, she had walked from Lincoln and had been walking all day.

“I cannot tell what mistress thinks,” Johnny went on:  “the others talk to each other—­a word now and then—­but she sits looking at the fire and says nothing.  I think she means to sit up late to-night.  Else why did she send me out for another faggot?” he asked, in his simple, puzzled way.  “But oh, Miss Hetty, she will be glad you’ve come back, and now we can all be happy again!”

She waved a hand feebly.  “Fetch Molly to me.”

By the pallor of her brow in the moonlight he made sure she was near to fainting:  and, indeed she was not far from it.  He ran and burst in at the kitchen-door impetuously; but meeting the eyes of the family, surprised—­as well they might be—­by the violence of his entry and his scared face, he became suddenly and absurdly diplomatic, crossed to Molly and whispered, as Mrs. Wesley turned her eyes from the fire.

“But where is the faggot?” she demanded.

“I—­I forgot it,” stammered Johnny and was for returning to fetch it.  Molly rose.

“Hetty is outside,” she announced.

For a second or two there was silence.  Mrs. Wesley turned to her crippled daughter.  “You had best bring her in.  The rest of you, go to bed.”

They obeyed at once and in silence.  Johnny, too, stole off to his mattress in the glass-doored cupboard under the stairs.

When Molly returned, leading in her sister, Mrs. Wesley was seated by the fire alone.  Mother and daughter looked into each other’s eyes.  In silence Hetty stepped forward and dropped into the chair a minute ago vacated by Kezzy.  But for the ticking of the tall clock there was no sound in the kitchen.

Mrs. Wesley read Hetty’s eyes; read the truth in them, and something else which tied her tongue.  She made no offer to rise and kiss her.

“You are hungry?” she asked after a while, and Molly pushed forward a plate of biscuits.  Hetty ate ravenously for a minute (for twenty-four hours not a morsel of food had passed her lips and she had walked close on thirty miles) and then pushed away the plate in disgust.  Her eyes still sought her mother’s; they neither pleaded nor reproached.

Yet Mrs. Wesley spoke, when next she spoke, as if choosing to answer a plea.  “Your father does not know of your return.  You may sleep with Molly to-night.”  She bent over the hearth and raked its embers together.  Molly laid a hand lightly on Hetty’s shoulder, then slipped it under the crook of her arm, and lifted and led her from the kitchen.