“Well, that’s just it,” said Mrs Bolt gently. “’Tis that what brought our Alice here to-day.”
The farmer grunted without speaking.
“The journey to Ameriky ’ull take every single shillin’ Ned Blanchard can scrape together,” she continued.
“He be a-goin’ to send Alice an’ the childern to the workhouse I d’ ’low,” remarked Mr Bolt, hitching his chair a little nearer to the hearth and holding up one foot to the blaze. “He be a-goin’ to scuttle off wi’ hisself to Ameriky an’ leave his wife an’ family on the rates.”
“Nay now, nay now,” protested Mrs Bolt in a soothing tone. “You’d never be the one to allow that, Bolt, you know you wouldn’t.”
“Me!” said Bolt, turning round with an expression of great surprise. “What have I got to do wi’ it?”
“Why, ye know very well, my dear, you’d be the last to let sich shame overtake your own flesh an’ blood. If Ned was once away, you wouldn’t ha’ no objections to your own daughter a-comin’ back here for a while, an’ your own grandchildern, would ye? They’d bring a bit o’ life about this place, an’ it ’ud be nice to have our Alice goin’ about the house again.”
There was a silence; Mr Bolt stirred up the contents of his pipe with the end of a match and lit it again.
“Little Abel be wonderful like his mother in his ways,” went on Mrs Bolt; “the very moral o’ what she used to be at his age. There’s her little chair in the corner, look-see. He found it out to-day an’ fetched it over aside o’ your chair, an’ sat hisself down in it—there, I declare for a minute I thought our Alice was a child again.”
Mr Bolt squinted round at the chair, but did not commit himself by speech. He was not an imaginative man, nevertheless the vision rose before him of the curly-headed child who used to sit in that chair, and whom he had loved as the apple of his eye. His wife put his thoughts into words.