George was restless and could not stop in one place. In every footstep behind him he heard the tread of the law; in every stranger who looked at him he saw a possible detective.
Over and over again he thought the situation out to himself, and wondered whether it would not be better to make a clean breast of it to justice, say who he was, prove his innocence, and so know the worst.
But this could not be done secretly. He knew that he would be charged, under any circumstances, with uttering the forged cheque, and he remembered with horror that he had endorsed the name of Smith and Co. upon it. Then he had been living under a false name, and he had left home in debt and difficulties.
No, he would rather wander about and endure a hundred miseries as George Smith than stand forth as George Heritage, and let his private life be read by the hundred eyes of the vulgar, with sneers and jeers and contemptuous laughter.
He was terribly sensitive of ridicule, and he saw at once the ridiculous figure he should cut as the clerk, at £3 a week, to a gang of swindlers.
Once or twice he was inclined to take Bess into his confidence; but here again his sensitiveness stepped in.
He could not bear even for his wife to know that he had been fooled. Their short dream of happiness, their humble little home life, had been so real and earnest, it was with something like a shudder he contemplated shattering the past.
No, for the present he would leave her in blissful ignorance of his stupidity and failure. But as the funds grew shorter and a pinch came, he grew terribly uneasy, and his face began to wear a worn, worried look, which frightened his young wife.
They moved on now from place to place, never stopping more than a night in any one. George scarcely slept. All night in the little bed-room in the village inn where they stayed he would lie and turn from side to side, thinking and conjuring up a thousand fancied catastrophes.
When the original funds were quite gone, and the worst stared him in the face, George, still carefully concealing the real aspect of affairs from Bess, surreptitiously pawned his watch and chain and his ring.