“Some of them will open their eyes to-morrow,” he muttered, with a half-laugh. “Well, it was time to act. I’m not going to be under petticoat government all my life.”
At the same time Mrs Glaire was seated pale and shivering in the dining-room, while all else in the house were sleeping soundly, and the street was now painfully still, for the murmuring workers of the foundry had long since sought their homes, more than one sending up a curse on Richard Glaire, instead of a prayer for his well-being and peace.
Volume Two—Chapter Eight.
Old Friends Again.
“If I could only tell him everything,” muttered John Maine, as he strode away from the vicar’s side, and made for the farm.
He was not half-way back, when he met Tom Brough, the keeper, who favoured him with a sneering, contemptuous kind of smile that made the young man’s blood boil. He knew him to be a rival, though he felt sure that Jessie did not favour his suit in the slightest degree. Still her uncle seemed to look upon Brough as a likely man to make his niece a good partner; for Tom Brough expected to come in for a fair amount of property, an old relative having him down in his will for succession to a comfortable farm—a nice thing, argued old Bultitude, for a young couple beginning life.
It might have been only fancy, but on reaching the crew-yard, old Bultitude seemed to John Maine to speak roughly to him. However, he took no notice, but went about his duties, worked very hard for a time, and went in at last to the evening meal, to find Jessie looking careworn and anxious.
After tea he sent a boy up with a message to the cricket-field, saying that he was too unwell to come; and after this he went to his own room to sit and think out his future, breaking off the thread of his musings and seeking Jessie, whom he found alone, and looking strange and distant.