At the murmured warning she braced her body stiffly, and no second sob came. But the tears ran—the first in all her long agony—and small shivers, as light winds play on aspen, chased one another down her throat. Almost you could guess them passing down her flesh beneath the sackcloth, rippling over its torn and purple ridges.
He did not check her weeping. The child—small, innocent cause of it— stood round-eyed, wondering. "She has been naughty. What has she done, to be so naughty?"
Over the maples the town clock slowly told the hour.
They were free. The Collector tossed away the half-smoked tobacco-leaf—his twelfth—drew a long breath, and emitted it with a gay laugh of relief. At the same moment he saw Mr. Trask's bullock-cart approaching down the dappled avenue.
Chapter XII.
THE HUT BY THE BEACH.
"And you'll never hold up your head again! No more will any of us.
The disgrace of it! the disgrace of it!"
Ruth stood in the middle of the wretched room, with her hands hanging slack and her eyes bent wearily upon her mother, who had collapsed upon a block of sawn timber, and sat there, with sack apron cast over her head, rocking her body.
"Hush, ye fool!" said old Josselin, and spat out of window. Mechanically, by habit, his dim eyes swept along the beach by the breakers' edge. "What's the use, any way?" he added.
"We, that always carried ourselves so high, for all our being poor!
It's God's mercy that took your father before he could see this day.
'Twould have broken his sperrit. Your father a Josselin, and me a
Pocock, with lands of my own—if right was law in this world; and now to
be stripped naked and marched through the streets!"