He held out his hand to shake hers; and, just as she gave it to him, the old grandmother came tottering up to ask some question.  The interruption jarred upon him, and made him once more keenly alive to the closeness of the air, and the squalor and dirt by which he was surrounded.

“My good woman,” said he to Nelly Brownson, “could you not keep your place a little neater and cleaner?  It is more fit for pigs than human beings.  The air in this room is quite offensive, and the dirt and filth is really disgraceful.”  By this time he was mounted, and, bowing to Ruth, he rode away.

Then the old woman’s wrath broke out.

“Who may you be, that knows no better manners than to come into a poor woman’s house to abuse it?—­fit for pigs, indeed!  What d’ye call yon fellow?”

“He is Mr. Bellingham,” said Ruth, shocked at the old woman’s apparent ingratitude.  “It was he that rode into the water to save your grandson.  He would have been drowned but for Mr. Bellingham.  I thought once they would both have been swept away by the current, it was so strong.”

“The river is none so deep, either,” the old woman said, anxious to diminish as much as possible the obligation she was under to one who had offended her.  “Some one else would have saved him, if this fine young spark had never been here.  He’s an orphan, and God watches over orphans, they say.  I’d rather it had been any one else as had picked him out, than one who comes into a poor body’s house only to abuse it.”

“He did not come in only to abuse it,” said Ruth gently.  “He came with little Tom; he only said it was not quite so clean as it might be.”

“What! you’re taking up the cry, are you?  Wait till you are an old woman like me, crippled with rheumatiz, and a lad to see after like Tom, who is always in mud when he isn’t in water; and his food and mine to scrape together (God knows we’re often short, and do the best I can), and water to fetch up that steep brow.”

She stopped to cough; and Ruth judiciously changed the subject, and began to consult the old woman as to the wants of her grandson, in which consultation they were soon assisted by the medical man.

When Ruth had made one or two arrangements with a neighbour whom she asked to procure the most necessary things, and had heard from the doctor that all would be right in a day or two, she began to quake at the recollection of the length of time she had spent at Nelly Brownson’s, and to remember, with some affright, the strict watch kept by Mrs. Mason over her apprentices’ out-goings and in-comings on working-days.  She hurried off to the shops, and tried to recall her wandering thoughts to the respective merits of pink and blue as a match to lilac, found she had lost her patterns, and went home with ill-chosen things, and in a fit of despair at her own stupidity.