On the elder time has made little impression; but Clem has developed noticeably.  The girl is now in the very prime of her ferocious beauty.  She has grown taller and somewhat stouter; her shoulders spread like those of a caryatid; the arm with which she props her head is as strong as a carter’s and magnificently moulded.  The head itself looks immense with its pile of glossy hair.  Reddened by the rays of the fire, her features had a splendid savagery which seemed strangely at discord with the paltry surroundings amid which she sat; her eyes just now were gleaming with a crafty and cruel speculation which would have become those of a barbarian in ambush.  I wonder how it came about that her strain, after passing through the basest conditions of modern life, had thus reverted to a type of ancestral exuberance.

’If only he doesn’t hear about the old man or the girl from somebody!’ said Mrs. Peckover.  ’I’ve been afraid of it ever since he come into the ’ouse.  There’s so many people might tell him.  You’ll have to come round him sharp, Clem.’

The mother was dressed as her kind are wont to be on Sunday morning—­that is to say, not dressed at all, but hung about with coarse garments, her hair in unbeautiful disarray.  Clem, on the other hand, seemed to have devoted much attention to her morning toilet; she wore a dark dress trimmed with velveteen, and a metal ornament of primitive taste gleamed amid her hair.

‘There ain’t no mistake?’ she asked, after a pause.  ’You’re jolly sure of that?’

’Mistake?  What a blessed fool you must be!  Didn’t they advertise in the papers for him?  Didn’t the lawyers themselves say as it was something to his advantage?  Don’t you say yourself as Jane says her grandfather’s often spoke about him and wished he could find him?  How can it be a mistake?  If it was only Bill’s letter we had to go on, you might talk; but—­there, don’t be a ijiot!’

‘If it turned out as he hadn’t nothing,’ remarked Clem resolutely, ‘I’d leave him, if I was married fifty times.’

Her mother uttered a contemptuous sound.  At the same time she moved her head as if listening; some one was, in fact, descending the stairs.

‘Here he comes,’ she whispered.  ‘Get the eggs ready, an’ I’ll make the corffee.’

A tap at the door, then entered a tallish man of perhaps forty, though he might be a year or two younger.  His face was clean-shaven, harsh-featured, unwholesome of complexion; its chief peculiarity was the protuberance of the bone in front of each temple, which gave him a curiously animal aspect.  His lower lip hung and jutted forward; when he smiled, as now in advancing to the fire, it slightly overlapped the one above.  His hair was very sparse; he looked, indeed, like one who has received the tonsure.  The movement of his limbs betokened excessive indolence; he dragged his feet rather than walked.  His attire was equally suggestive; not only had it fallen into the last degree of shabbiness (having originally been such as is worn by a man above the mechanic ranks), but it was patched with dirt of many kinds, and held together by a most inadequate supply of buttons.  At present he wore no collar, and his waistcoat, half-open, exposed a red shirt.