"If you had seen that weird old man—" began her husband.
"He is dead, I have seen her, and she haunts me."
Perhaps Mrs. Bellamie would not have been haunted if she had never stolen those coals. Adversity breeds charity, and tenderness is the daughter of Dame Want. Love does not fly out of the window when poverty comes in. Only the imp who masquerades as the true god does that. The son of Venus gets between husband and wife and hugs them tighter to warm himself.
"I am a descendant of Richard Bellamie," said her husband, getting his crest up like a proud cockatoo, "father of Alice, quasi bella et amabilis, who was mother of Bishop Jewel of famous memory. You, my dear, are a daughter of the Courtenays, atavis editi re gibus, and royalty itself can boast of blood no better. Let the whole country become Socialist, the Bellamies and Courtenays will stand aloof."
Mr. Bellamie smiled to himself. There was a classical purity about his utterance which stimulated his system like a glass of rare wine.
"I know," said the lady. "I am referring to my feelings, nothing else." She was still thinking of the coals, and it seemed to her that a certain portion of her knee began to throb.
"When it comes to affairs of the heart, even the Bellamies and Courtenays are Socialists," she said archly.
Mr. Bellamie did not reply directly to that. He loved his wife, and yet he carried her off, when the days of coal-stealing had been accomplished, as much for her name as anything else.
"My dear, let me understand you," he said. "Do you want Aubrey to marry this nameless girl?"
"I don't know myself what I want," came the answer. "I only know it is horrible to think of the poor brave child living alone and unprotected on the moor. Suppose one of those rough men broke into her cottage?"