"Come now, deary, don't be talking nonsense. Nice and fit you'd be to
bear with a cottage life after all you've been seeing. Don't you think
the gentlefolks would give you up so easily as that. But whenever you
want a word of love and a heart to rest your bit of a head upon like
this, mind you remember where they're always waiting for you, Hetty."

Hetty sobbed and clung to her more closely, and it was some time before
she could be induced to eat and drink. When she did so the homely meal
set before her seemed to her the most delicious she had ever tasted.

"Oh I am so glad I have found my way back to you," she said; "I never
should have done it if I hadn't got into such trouble. Oh, you don't
know how proud and bad I have been! I know I've been bad, now that you
are so good to me."

After about an hour John Kane came back. He had been obliged to wait to
put up his horses and see to their wants for the night before he could
come home. The message he brought from the Hall was that Hetty must stay
where she was till her foot was better, as moving about was so bad for a
sprain. Mrs. Enderby would see Mrs. Kane about her to-morrow.

The tiny whitewashed room where she slept that night was the one in
which she had slept when a toddling baby, and Hetty wondered at herself
as she looked round it thankfully. A patchwork quilt covered the bed,
and a flower-pot in the one small window, and some coloured prints on
the wall, were its only adornments. But it was extremely clean and neat,
and, in spite of the pain in her foot, Hetty felt more content as she
laid her head on the coarse pillow than she had felt for a great many
weeks past.