“Let him bring the poor thing in. There ain’t nowhere to put her, and there ain’t nothing to give her, but she can’t lie out in the cold.”

“Haven’t you got a drop of milk?” asked Richard.

“Milk!” echoed the woman. “It’s weeks and weeks since the children’s tasted of it. The wonder to me is that the cows let a poor man milk them!”

Richard set Alice on her feet, but she could hardly stand alone. The woman fetched a light, and now came to the door with a candle-end. Her husband kept prudently in her shadow.

“Poor thing! poor thing!” she said when she saw her. “Bring her in, sir. There’s a chair she can sit on. I’ll get her a drop of tea—that’ll be better than milk. There’s next to no work, and the squire, he’s mad at Giles here because of some rabbit or other they says he snared—which they say was a hare, I don’t know. Well, if the parson says me and my man’ll be judged for sake of a hare or a rabbit, and the children starving, I’ll give him a piece of my mind! But the day’ll come when the rich and poor’ll have a turn about. Leastways, there’s something like that somewhere in the Bible. And if it be in the Bible, it’s likely to be true, for the Bible does take the part of the rich mostly.”

She was a woman who liked to hear herself talk, and so she spoke as one listening to herself. Like most people, whether they talk or not, she got her ideas second-hand. But Richard was not inclined to differ with what she said about the Bible, for he knew little more, and no better about it than she. Had parson Wingfold, who did know the Bible, heard her, he would have told her that there was not a word in it against the poor, while there were a multitude of words against the rich. The sins of the poor are not once mentioned in the Bible, the sins of the rich very often. The rich may think this hard, but Wingfold simply stated the facts and did not much care what they thought. When a man comes to judge himself and others fairly, he will understand that God is no respecter of persons, and will favour neither the rich nor the poor in his cause.