thick walls, had a double door. He shut the one with a stern slam,
and then the other; and though the honest maid loitered in the hall,
and, indeed, placed her ear very near the door, she was not much the
wiser.

There was some imperfectly heard talk in the parlour, and cries, and
sobs, and more talking. Then before Betty was aware, the door suddenly
opened, and out came Mary Matchwell, with gleaming eyes, and a pale
laugh of spite and victory and threw a look, as she passed, upon the
maid that frightened her, and so vanished into her coach.

Nutter disengaged himself from poor Mrs. Nutter's arms, in which he was
nearly throttled, while she sobbed and shrieked--

'Oh! Charley, dear--dearest Charley--Charley, darling--isn't it
frightful?' and so on.

'Betty, take care of her,' was all he said, and that sternly, like a man
quietly desperate, but with a dismal fury in his face.

He went into the little room on the other side of the now darkening
hall, and shut the door, and locked it inside. It was partly because he
did not choose to talk just now any more with his blubbering and
shrieking wife. He was a very kind husband, in his way, but a most
incapable nurse, especially in a case of hysterics.

He came out with a desk in his hands.

'Moggy,' he said, in a low tone, seeing his other servant-woman in the
dusk crossing at the foot of the stairs, 'here, take this desk, leave it
in our bed-room--'tis for the mistress; tell her so by-and-by.'

The wench carried it up; but poor Mrs. Nutter was in no condition to
comprehend anything, and was talking quite wildly, and seemed to be
growing worse rather than better.

Nutter stood alone in the hall, with his back to the door from which he
had just emerged, his hands in his pockets, and the same dreary and
wicked shadow over his face.

'So that----Sturk will carry his point after all,' he muttered.

On the hall wainscot just opposite hung his horse-pistols; and when he
saw them, and that wasn't for a while--for though he was looking
straight at them, he was staring, really, quite through the dingy wooden
panel at quite other objects three hundred miles away--when he _did_ see
them, I say, he growled in the same tone--

'I wish one of those bullets was through my head, so t'other was through
his.'

And he cursed him with laconic intensity. Then Nutter slapped his
pockets, like a man feeling if his keys and other portable chattels are
all right before he leaves his hom