“Don’t lag, boys.  You’ve got nothing to change into,” said Betty, pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in gardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, which stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger.  She gripped Archer’s hand.  On she plodded up the hill.

“What did I ask you to remember?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Archer.

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives’ tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—­who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer than any man?

Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with.

She had her hand upon the garden gate.

“The meat!” she exclaimed, striking the latch down.

She had forgotten the meat.

There was Rebecca at the window.

The bareness of Mrs. Pearce’s front room was fully displayed at ten o’clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the table.  The harsh light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn; lit up a child’s bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge.  Mrs. Flanders had left her sewing on the table.  There were her large reels of white cotton and her steel spectacles; her needle-case; her brown wool wound round an old postcard.  There were the bulrushes and the Strand magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys’ boots.  A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe.  The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light.  A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass.  There was a hurricane out at sea.

Archer could not sleep.

Mrs. Flanders stooped over him.  “Think of the fairies,” said Betty Flanders.  “Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on their nests.  Now shut your eyes and see the old mother bird with a worm in her beak.  Now turn and shut your eyes,” she murmured, “and shut your eyes.”

The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing; the cistern overflowing; water bubbling and squeaking and running along the pipes and streaming down the windows.

“What’s all that water rushing in?” murmured Archer.

“It’s only the bath water running away,” said Mrs. Flanders.

Something snapped out of doors.

“I say, won’t that steamer sink?” said Archer, opening his eyes.

“Of course it won’t,” said Mrs. Flanders.  “The Captain’s in bed long ago.  Shut your eyes, and think of the fairies, fast asleep, under the flowers.”

“I thought he’d never get off—­such a hurricane,” she whispered to Rebecca, who was bending over a spirit-lamp in the small room next door.  The wind rushed outside, but the small flame of the spirit-lamp burnt quietly, shaded from the cot by a book stood on edge.