"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?