all true. She
might have taken more and Timothy less; no doubt she was making it out
as bad as she could for Timothy. But it lay between them--his wife and
his son--it lay between them.

"An' I 'eard yer coming," she ended; "an' I thought I'd tell yer--an' I
wor frightened about the 'arf-crowns--people 'ad been talkin' so at
Dawson's--an' I didn't see no way out--an'--an'----"

She ceased, her hand plucking again at the comforter, her throat
working.

He, too, thought of the loving words he had said to her, and the memory
of them only made his misery the more fierce.

"An' there ain't no way out," he said violently, raising his head.
"Yer'll be took before the magistrates next week, an' the assizes 'ull
be in February, an' yer'll get six months--if yer don't get more."

She got up from her chair as though physically goaded by the words.

"I'll not go to jail," she said under her breath. "I'll not----"

A sound of scorn broke from Isaac.

"Yo' should ha' thought o' that," he said. "Yo' should ha' thought o'
that. An' what you've been sayin' about Timothy don't make it a
'aporth the better--not for _yo'_! Yo' led _'im_ into it too--if it
'adn't been for yo', 'ee'd never ha' _seen_ the cursed stuff. Yo've
dragged 'im down worse nor 'ee were--an' yerself--an' the childer--an'
me. An' the drink, an' the lyin'!--it turns a man's stomach to think
on it. An' I've been livin' with yer--these twelve years. I wish to
the Lord I'd never seen yer--as the children 'ad never been born!
They'll be known all their life now--as 'avin' 'ad sich a woman for
their mother!"

A demon of passion possessed him more and more. He looked at her with
murderous eyes, his hand on the table working.

For his world, too, lay in ruins about him. Through many hard-working
and virtuous years he had counted among the righteous men of the
village--the men whom the Almighty must needs reckon to the good
whenever the score of Clinton Magna had to be made up. And this
pre-eminence had come to be part of the habitual furniture of life and
thought. To be suddenly stripped of it--to be not only disgraced by
his wife, to be thrust down himself among the low and sinful herd--this
thought made another man of him; made him wicked, as it were, perforce.
For who that heard the story would ever believe that he was not the
partner of her crime? Had he not eaten and drunk of it; were not he
and his children now clothed by it?

Bessie did not