great dinner in the week. Putting down the bowl which contained them,
she stepped to the door and looked after her daughter's vanishing
figure.

"Sure enough, it is," she said. "Whatever's amiss? The lass went over
to the Moss. Why, she stopping, isn't she?" "Ey, at the Lion,"
answered Mattha. "I reckon there's summat wrang agen with that Robbie.
I'll just slip away and see."

Panting and heated on this winter's day, red up to the roots of the
hair and down to the nape of the neck, Liza had come to a full pause
at the door of the village inn. It was not a false instinct that had
led the girl to choose this destination. Sunday as it was, the young
man whom she sought was there, and, morning though it might be, he was
already in that condition of partial inebriation which Liza had
recognized as the sign of a facetious mood.

Opening the door with a disdainful push, compounded partly of her
contempt for the place and partly of the irritation occasioned by the
events that had brought her to the degradation of calling there, Liza
cried out, as well as she could in her present breathless condition,--

"Robbie, come your ways out of this."

The gentleman addressed was at the moment lying in a somewhat
undignified position on the floor. Half sprawling, half resting on one
knee, Robbie was surprised in the midst of an amusement of which the
perky little body whom he claimed as his sweetheart had previously
expressed her high disdain. This consisted of a hopeless endeavor to
make a lame dog dance. The animal in question was no other than 'Becca