signs--

Oh! if she could only think of some way of putting it back--this
thirty-odd pounds. She held her head between her hands, thinking and
thinking. Couldn't that little lawyer man to whom she went every month
at Bedford, to fetch her legacy money--couldn't he lend it her, and keep
her money till it was paid? She could make up a story, and give him
something for himself to induce him to hold his tongue. She had thought
of this often before, but never so urgently as now. She would take the
carrier's cart to Bedford next day, while Isaac was at work, and try.

Yet all the time despair was at her heart. So hard to undo! Yet how easy
it had been to take and to spend. She thought of that day in September,
when she had got the news of her legacy--six shillings a week from an
old aunt--her father's aunt, whose very existence she had forgotten. The
wild delight of it! Isaac got sixteen shillings a week in wages--here
was nearly half as much again. She was warned that it would come to an
end in two years. But none the less it seemed to her a fortune--and all
her life, before it came, mere hard pinching and endurance. She had
always been one to spend where she could. Old John had often rated her
for it. So had Isaac. But that was his money. This was hers, and he who,
for religious reasons, had never made friends with or thought well of
any of her family, instinctively disliked the money which had come from
them, and made few inquiries into the spending of it.

Oh! the joy of those first visits to Frampton, when all the shops had
seemed to be there for her, and she their natural mistress! How ready
people had been to trust her in the village! How tempting it had been to
brag and make a mystery! That old skinflint, Mrs. Moulsey, at 'the
shop,' she had been all sugar and sweets _then_.

And a few weeks later--six, seven weeks later--about the beginning of
October, these halcyon days had all come to an end. She owed what she
could not pay--people had ceased to smile upon her--she was harassed,
excited, worried out of her life.

Old familiar wonder of such a temperament! How can it be so easy to
spend, so delightful to promise, and so unreasonably, so unjustly
difficult, to pay?

She began to be mortally afraid of Isaac--of the effect of disclosures.
One night she was alone in the cottage, almost beside herself under the
pressure of one or two claims she could not meet--one claim especially,
that of a little jeweller, from w