ase. You'll walk up to the house now, and I'll introduce you to my
wife?'

'We don't mind if we do eat a bit,--do we, Jack?' said Crinkett. Jack
bobbed his head, and so they walked back to Folking, the three of them
together, while the two Mr. Boltons and Uncle Babington followed behind.
The ladies and the baby had been taken in a carriage.

The distance from the church to the house at Folking was less than half
a mile, but Caldigate thought that he would never reach his hall door.
How was he to talk to the men,--with what words and after what fashion?
And what should he say about them to his wife when he reached home? She
had seen him speak to them, had known that he had been obliged to stay
behind with them when it would have been so natural that he should have
been at her side as she got into the carriage. Of that he was aware, but
he could not know how far their presence would have frightened her.
'Yes,' he said, in answer to some question from Crinkett; 'the property
round here is not exactly mine, but my father's.'

'They tell me as it's yours now?' said Crinkett.

'You haven't to learn to-day that in regard to other people's concerns
men talk more than they know. The land is my father's estate, but I live
here.'

'And him?' asked Adamson.

'He lives in Cambridge.'

'That's what we mean,--ain't it, Crinkett?' said Adamson. 'You're boss
here?'

'Yes, I'm boss.'

'And a deuced good time you seem to have of it,' said Crinkett.

'I've nothing to complain of,' replied Caldigate, feeling himself at the
moment to be the most miserable creature in existence.

It was fearful work,--work so cruel that his physical strength hardly
enabled him to support it. He already repented his present conduct,
telling himself that it would have been better to have treated the men
from the first as spies and enemies;--though in truth his conduct had
probably been the wisest he could have adopted. At last he had the men
inside the hall door, and, introducing them hurriedly to his father, he
left them that he might rush up to his wife's bedroom. The nurse was
there and her mother; and, at the moment, she only looked at him. She
was too wise to speak to him before them. But at last she succeeded in
making an opportunity of being alone with her husband. 'You stay here,
nurse; I'll be back directly, mamma,' and then she took him across the
passage into his own dressing-room. 'Who are they, John? who are they?'

'They are men fro