As he struggled for the plate, Amy bent forward and hit his arm violently with the handle of the knife.  This was the signal for a general scrimmage, in the midst of which Tom caught up a hearth-brush and flung it at Amy’s head.  The missile went wide of its mark and shivered one of the windowpanes.

‘There now!’ exclaimed Annie, who had begun to cry in consequence of a blow from Tom’s fist.  ‘See what father says to that!’

‘If I was him,’ said Amy, in a low voice of passion, ’I’d tie you to something and beat you till you lost your senses.  Ugly brute!’

The warfare would not have ended here but that the door opened and he of whom they spoke made his appearance.

In the past two years and a half John Hewett had become a shaky old man.  Of his grizzled hair very little remained, and little of his beard; his features were shrunken, his neck scraggy; he stooped much, and there was a senile indecision in his movements.  He wore rough, patched clothing, had no collar, and seemed, from the state of his hands, to have been engaged in very dirty work.  As he entered and came upon the riotous group his eyes lit up with anger.  In a strained voice he shouted a command of silence.

‘It’s all that Tom, father,’ piped Annie.  ’There’s no living with him.’

John’s eye fell on the broken window.

‘Which of you’s done that?’ he asked sternly, pointing to it.

No one spoke.

‘Who’s goin’ to pay for it, I’d like to know?  Doesn’t it cost enough to keep you, but you must go makin’ extra expense?  Where’s the money to come from, I want to know, if you go on like this?’

He turned suddenly upon the elder girl.

’I’ve got something to say to you, Miss.  Why wasn’t you at work this morning?’

Amy avoided his look.  Her pale face became mottled with alarm, but only for an instant; then she hardened herself and moved her head insolently.

‘Why Wasn’t you at work?  Where’s your week’s money?’

‘I haven’t got any.’

‘You haven’t got any?  Why not?’

For a while she was stubbornly silent, but Hewett constrained her to confession at length.  On his way home to-day he had been informed by an acquaintance that Amy was wandering about the streets at an hour when she ought to have been at her employment.  Unable to put off the evil moment any longer, the girl admitted that four days ago she was dismissed for bad behaviour, and that since then she had pretended to go to work as usual.  The trifling sum paid to her on dismissal she had spent.

John turned to his youngest daughter and asked in a hollow voice: 

‘Where’s Clara?’

‘She’s got one of her headaches, father,’ replied the girl, trembling.

He turned and went from the room.