* * * * *

One day, after the Consul's family had returned from the bathing-place,
Barbara set out for the tinsmith's. It was late in the autumn. She could
hardly ever remember the road out there so bad and muddy as it was now.
Both her boots and the bottom of her dress would need cleaning and
washing when she got back again.

The thought that she would soon see her boy put her in a cold
perspiration; but of course things were best as they were, now that she
could pay so well for him.

When she turned in by the wooden fence and saw the cottage with its
familiar cracked windows in front of her, she slackened her pace a
little. A feeling of apprehension suddenly came over her.

And then the neighbour's wife, whom she had so often helped, came out
and began to talk and give her information, rattling on like a
steam-engine. There had been war among the neighbours in the tinsmith's
alley, and now that she saw Barbara herself, the truth should out, the
real, actual truth.

The tinsmith's people need not imagine that other people hadn't got eyes
in their head! Everything they possessed had gone to the pawnbroker's;
there was barely enough of the tin-ware left to put in his cracked
windows. And what they lived on, nobody round there could imagine,
unless it was the payment they got for that poor little ill-used boy,
that they gave lager-beer to, to keep him quiet. For no one would put up
there now that the police had begun to keep an eye on the company, not