Amy affected to pay no attention.  She kept swallowing morsels, with ugly movements of her lips and jaws.

’How often have I to tell you all that if it wasn’t for Sidney Kirkwood you’d have been workhouse children?  As sure as you’re livin’, you’d all of you have gone to the workhouse!  And you go on just as if you didn’t owe thanks to nobody.  I tell you it’ll be years and years before one of you’ll have a penny you can call your own.  If it was Annie or Tom behaved so careless, there’d be less wonder; but for a girl of your age—­I’m ashamed as you belong to me!  You can’t even keep your tongue from bein’ impudent to Clara, her as you ain’t worthy to be a servant to!’

‘Clara’s a sneak,’ observed Tom, with much coolness.  ’She’s always telling lies about us.’

‘I’ll half-knock your young head off your shoulders,’ cried his father, furiously, ’if you talk to me like that!  Not one of you’s fit to live in the same house with her.’

‘Father, I haven’t done nothing,’ whimpered Annie, hurt by being thus included in his reprobation.

’No more you have—­not just now, but you’re often enough more trouble to your sister than you need be.  But it’s you I’m talkin’ to, Amy.  You dare to leave this house again till there’s another place found for you!  If you’d any self-respect, you couldn’t bear to look Sidney in the face.  Suppose you hadn’t such a brother to work for you, what would you do, eh?  Who’d buy your food?  Who’d pay the rent of the house you live in?’

A noteworthy difference between children of this standing and such as pass their years of play-time in homes unshadowed by poverty.  For these, life had no illusions.  Of every mouthful that they ate, the price was known to them.  The roof over their heads was there by no grace of Providence, but solely because such-and-such a sum was paid weekly in hard cash, when the collector came; let the payment fail, and they knew perfectly well what the result would be.  The children of the upper world could not even by chance give a thought to the sources whence their needs are supplied; speech on such a subject in their presence would be held indecent.  In John Hewett’s position, the indecency, the crime, would have been to keep silence and pretend that the needs of existence are ministered to as a matter of course.

His tone and language were pitifully those of feeble age.  The emotion proved too great a strain upon his body, and he had at length to sit down in a tremulous state, miserable with the consciousness of failing authority.  He would have made but a poor figure now upon Clerkenwell Green.  Even as his frame was shrunken, so had the circle of his interests contracted; he could no longer speak or think on the subjects which had fired him through the better part of his life; if he was driven to try and utter himself on the broad questions of social wrong, of the people’s cause, a senile stammering of incoherencies was the only result.  The fight had. ever gone against John Hewett; he was one of those who are born to be defeated.  His failing energies spent themselves in conflict with his own children; the concerns of a miserable home were all his mind could now cope with.