s forgotten.

JUDITH:
Thank God, it wasn't Jim.

BELL:
And so say I:
Though, kenning only Peter, I'm inclined
To fancy Jim may be the better man.
What licks me is, what it's to do with you?
And why I answer your delicate questions, woman?
Even old hard-boiled drew the line somewhere.

JUDITH:
I'm the mother of Jim's daughter.

BELL:
You're the wench
The bride found here--and the mother of a daughter;
And live ...

JUDITH:
At Bellingham.

BELL:
Where Michael finds
So often he's pressing business, must be seen to--
Something to do with sheep. I see ... To think
I didn't guess! Why is it, any man
Can put the blinkers on us? But, was I blind,
Or only wanting not to see--afraid
Of what I've been itching after all these years?
Can a hawk be caged so long, it's scared to watch
The cage door opening? More to it than that:
After all, there's something of the mother in me.
Ay: you've found Michael's minney! As for his dad,
It's eight-year since he quitted Krindlesyke,
The second time, for good.

JUDITH:
He left you?

BELL:
Hooked it:
But, shed no tears for me: he only left me,
As a sobering lout will quit the bramble-bush
He's tumbled in, blind-drunk--or was it an anthill
He'd pillowed his fuddled head on? Anyway,
He went, sore-skinned; and gay to go; escaped
From Krindlesyke--he always had the luck--
Before the bitter winter that finished Ezra:
But, I'd to stay on, listening all day long
To that old dotard, counting the fifty sovereigns
Your fancy man made off with, when he cleaned out
The coffers of Krindlesyke, the very day
Ananias and I came for our share, too late:
And so, got stuck at Back-o'-Beyont, like wasps
In a treacle-trap--the gold all gone: naught left
But the chink of coins in an old man's noddle, that age
Had emptied of wits. He'd count them, over and over--
Just stopping to curse Jim, when he called to mind
The box was empty: and, often, in the night,
I'd hear him counting, counting in the dark,
Till the night he stopped at forty-nine, stopped dead,
With a rattle--not a breath to whisper fifty.
A crookt corpse, yellow as his lost gold, I found him,
When I fetched my candle.

JUDITH:
Dead?

BELL:
Ay, guttered out--
A dip burned to the socket. May chance puff out
My f