"Aye, Cleg, is that you?" said Vara. "She's oot; ye can come in."
So Cleg trotted briskly down the slimy black steps, from which the top hand-rail had long since vanished. The stumpy palings themselves would also have disappeared if they had been anything else than cast metal, a material which can neither be burned nor profitably disposed of to the old junk man.
Vara met him at the foot. She was a pleasant, round-faced, merry-eyed girl of ten—or, rather, she would have been round-faced but for the pitiful drawing about the mouth and the frightened look with which she seemed to shrink back at any sudden movement near her. As Cleg arrived at the door of the cellar a foul, dank smell rose from the depths to meet him; and he, fresh from the air and cleanliness of his own new abode among the shavings and the chips, noticed it as he would not have done had he come directly from the house by the brickfield.
"She gaed awa' last nicht wi' an ill man," said Vara, "and I hae seen nocht o' her since."
Vara Kavannah spoke of Sheemus Kavannah as "faither," but always of her mother as "she." To-day the girl had her fair hair done up in a womanly net and stowed away on the top of her head. When one has the cares of a house and family, it is necessary to dress in a grown-up fashion. Indeed, in some of her moods, when the trouble of Hugh and the baby lay heavy on her, Vara looked like a little old woman, as if she had been her own fairy godmother fallen upon evil times.
But to-day she had her head also tied in a napkin, rolled white and smooth about her brows. Cleg glanced at it with the quick comprehension which comes from a kindred bitterness.
"Her?" he queried, as much with his thumb and eyebrow as with his voice.
"Aye," said Vara, looking down at the floor, for in the Lands such occurrences were not spoken of outside the family; "yestreen."
Hearing the voices at the door, little Hugh, Vara's brother of four, came toddling unevenly upon legs which ought to have been chubby, but which were only feeble and uncertain. He had one hand wrapped in a piece of white rag; and, whenever he remembered, he carried it in his other hand and wept over it with a sad, wearying whimper.
Cleg again looked his query at Vara.