but Jim's Louisa to look after her.

He grew rather downhearted as he trudged along, thinking. She and he had
stuck together 'a many year.' There would be nobody left for him to go
along with when she was gone. There was his niece Bessie Costrell and
her husband, and there was his silly old cousin Widow Waller. He dared
say they'd both of them want him to live with them. At the thought a
grin crossed his ruddy face. They both knew about _it_--that was what it
was. And he wouldn't live with either of them, not he. Not yet a bit,
anyway. All the same, he had a fondness for Bessie and her husband.
Bessie was always very civil to _him_--he chuckled again--and if
anything had to be done with _it_, while he was five miles off at
Frampton on a job of work that had been offered him, he didn't know but
he'd as soon trust Isaac Costrell and Bessie as anybody else. You might
call Isaac rather a fool, what with his religion, and 'extempry prayin,
an that,' but all the same Bolderfield thought of him with a kind of
uneasy awe. If ever there was a man secure of the next world it was
Isaac Costrell. His temper, perhaps, was 'nassty,' which might pull him
down a little when the last account came to be made up; and it could not
be said that his elder children had come to much, for all his piety.
But, on the whole, Bolderfield only wished he stood as well with the
powers talked about in chapel every Sunday as Isaac did.

As for Bessie, she had been a wasteful woman all her life, with never a
bit of money put by, and never a good dress to her back. But, 'Lor bless
yer, there was a many worse folk nor Bessie.' She wasn't one of your
sour people--she could make you laugh; she had a merry heart. Many a
pleasant evening had he passed chatting with her and Isaac; and whenever
they cooked anything good there was always a bite for him. Yes, Bessie
had been a good niece to him; and if he trusted any one he dared say
he'd trust them.

'Well, how's Eliza, Muster Bolderfield?' said a woman who passed him in
the village street.

He replied, and then went his way, sobered again, dreading to find
himself at the cottage once more, and in the stuffy upper room with the
bed and the dying woman. Yet he was not really sad, not here at least,
out in the air and the sun. There was always a thought in his mind, a
fact in his consciousness, which stood between him and sadness. It had
so stood for a long, long time. He walked through the village to-night
in