"Poor Jim!" she said. And again: "Poor Jim!"
He trembled, breathing quickly, and held her tight.
After a while he regained control of himself, and sat upright. But he still held her tightly to him with his right arm.
They began to discuss his plight and how he might best defend himself. She was fully as fearful as he. But she did not show it. She must cheer him up, and she kept insisting that the police could not fix the murder on him, that they had nothing to go upon. If they had, they would have already arrested him. Certainly they knew what the servants and the village people were saying. But that was just talk. There wasn't any evidence; there couldn't be any evidence.
Her support and encouragement put a new spirit into him. He had been so alone against the world. His own family, though they had loudly and fiercely protested his innocence to their friends and enemies in the village, had not expressed this faith in him to him.
Indeed, his father had expressed their real belief, when he said to him gloomily: "I always told you that damned temper of yours would get you into trouble, Jim."
Then Elizabeth gave him his tea. After it they talked calmly with an actual approach to cheerfulness till it was time for her to return to the Castle to dress Olivia's hair for dinner. Then she would have it that he should escort her back to the Castle. She declared, truly enough, that he was doing himself no good by moping at the cottage, that people would say that he dare not show himself. He must hold his head up.
She insisted also that they should take the long way round, through the village; that people should see them together. She insisted that he should look cheerful, and talk to her all the length of the village street. The looking cheerful helped to lighten his spirit yet more. As they went through the village she kept looking up at him in an affectionate fashion and smiling.
The village was, indeed, taken aback. It had made up its mind that James Hutchings was a pariah to be shunned. It was not only taken aback, it was annoyed. It had no wish that its belief that James Hutchings had murdered Lord Loudwater should be in any way unsettled.
Mrs. Roper, the mother of William Roper and a lifelong enemy of the Hutchings family, summed up the feeling of her neighbours about the behaviour of James Hutchings and Elizabeth.