"On your faith?" she asked, with another uneasy glance at Rachel.

"On my faith," he answered.

She moved towards the door, with her draggle-tail of infants. As she was vanishing, he called shame-facedly to the departing children,—

"Well, Joshua! Well, Miriam! Is this the way one treats a father? A nice way your mother has brought you up!"

They came back to him dubiously, with unwashed, pathetic faces, and he kissed them. Rachel bent down to pick up her rabbit-skin. Work was resumed in dead silence.


CHAPTER III.

FLIGHT.

"The goose flew this way and flew that,
And filled the house with clamour."

—Tennyson: The Goose.