keeps his stick beside him and gives us some awful cracks, and yells at the little girls enough to ruin their wits."
"You must take him to the hospital today. He should have gone long ago."
It was arranged that Derek and Lottie should attend to the stock and do the milking for the three days that were required for Bill's journey to Yeoland where the hospital was, and where, nearby, the Rains had some relations.
Derek was glad when the fruit waggon, on the bottom of which Bill had made a bed of straw for his father, passed into the road. He felt that some blame was attached to himself for not having enquired more closely into Rain's condition.
Bill returned on the third day and told how his father had suffered on the journey and was now lying in the hospital awaiting an operation. But he was cheerful, he said, and full of gratitude to his benefactor.
His benefactor! Vale groaned. He who had let him lie and rot all winter.
In a fortnight (it was now late in February) a letter came from Yeoland to the Rains. Lottie and Bill brought it to Vale to read to them. The lamp had just been lighted, and, as he bent forward in the circle of lamplight to read, he was struck by the pathos of the two waiting figures by the door—Bill clutching his cap, Lottie her shawl, attentive, anxious, dark, humble.
Rain was dead all right. The cold, dry letter of the matron said so. They must come at once if they wanted the body. (That poor, lank, huddled body in the cart! it came between Vale and the letter.) He read it aloud, trying somehow to soften it.
Lottie and Bill stared at the floor. "Dear, oh dear," Lottie said softly. Bill said: "Well, paw's dead. I thought
