“Put it on at once; it is not to be only looked at,” said Bessie.

The woman proceeded to obey, but when she wanted to tie it behind she found a difficulty from a stiffness of one shoulder, and said, “It is the rheumatics, miss; one catches it being out in the wet.”

“Let me tie it for you,” said Bessie.

“Thank you, miss, and thank the mistress for her goodness,” said the woman when it was done, gazing curiously at the young lady.  And she stooped again to her task, the wind making sport with her thin and scanty skirts.

Bessie walked farther down the grove, green in the teeth of winter.  She was thinking that this poor widow, work and pain included, was not less contented with her lot than herself or than the beautiful young lady who reigned at Castlemount.  Yet it was a cruelly hard lot, and might be ameliorated with very little thought.  “Blessed is he that considereth the poor,” says the old-fashioned text, and Bessie reflected that her proud school-fellow was in the way of earning this blessing.

She was confirmed in that opinion on the following day, when the weather was more genial, and they took a drive together in the afternoon and passed through the hamlet of Morte.  It had formed itself round a dilapidated farm-house, now occupied as three tenements, in one of which lived the widow.  The carriage stopped in the road, and Mrs. Chiverton got out with her companion and knocked at the door.  It was opened by a shrewd-visaged, respectable old woman, and revealed a clean interior, but very indigent, with the tea-table set, and on a wooden stool by the hearth a tall, fair young woman sitting, who rose and dropt a smiling curtsey to Miss Fairfax:  she was Alice, the second housemaid at Abbotsmead, and waited on the white suite.  She explained that Mrs. Macky had given her leave to walk over and see her mother, but she was out at work; and this was her aunt Jane, retired from service and come to live at home with her widowed sister.

An old range well polished, an oven that would not bake, and a boiler that would not hold water,—­this was the fireplace.  The floor was of bricks, sunken in waves and broken; through a breach in the roof of the chamber over the “house” blew the wind and leaked the rain, in spite of a sack stuffed with straw thrust between the rafters and the tiles.

“Yes, ma’am, my poor sister has lived in this place for sixteen years, and paid the rent regularly, three pounds a year:  I’ve sent her the money since she lost her husband,” said the retired servant, in reply to some question of Mrs. Chiverton’s.  “Blagg is such a miser that he won’t spend a penny on his places; it is promise, promise for ever.  And what can my poor sister do?  She dar’n’t affront him, for where could she go if she was turned out of this?  There’s a dozen would jump at it, houses is so scarce and not to be had.”

“There ought to be a swift remedy for wretches like Blagg,” Mrs. Chiverton indignantly exclaimed when they were clear of the foul-smelling hamlet.  “Why cannot it be an item of duty for the rural police to give information of his extortion and neglect?  Those poor women are robbed, and they are utterly helpless to resist it.  It is a greater crime than stealing on the highway.”