"Yes; she's a bookkeeper, and earns her pound a week. She was always
clever at figures. She got on so well at the school that they wanted
her to be a teacher, but she didn't like it. Then Mr. Reckitt, the
ironmonger, a friend of her father's, got her to help him with his
books and bills of an evening, and when she was seventeen, because
his business was growing and he hadn't much of a head for figures
himself, he took her regular into the shop. And glad she was to give
up the school-teaching, for she could never abear it."

"You say she had a lot of trouble?"

"Ah, that indeed she had! And all her father's fault. But for him,
foolish man, they might have been a well-to-do family. But he's had
to suffer for it himself, too. He lives up here on the hill, in a
poor cottage, and takes wages as a timekeeper at Robinson's when he
ought to have been paying men of his own. The drink--that's what
it was. When our Martha first knew them they were living at Walsall,
and if it hadn't a' been for Eve they'd have had no home at all.
Martha got to know her at the Sunday-school; Eve used to teach a
class. That's seven or eight years ago; she was only a girl of
sixteen, but she had the ways of a grown-up woman, and very lucky it
was for them belonging to her. Often and often they've gone for days
with nothing but a dry loaf, and the father spending all he got at
the public."

"Was it a large family?" Hilliard inquired.

"Well, let me see; at that time there was Eve's two sisters and her
brother. Two other children had died, and the mother was dead, too.
I don't know much about _her_, but they say she was a very good sort