The clerk was selling the cow.
'Going for twenty-five pounds. What? no one bid, going for twenty-five pounds, and dirt cheap at the money, all silent! Well I never, and such a cow! Going for twenty-three——'
'Stop!' shouted Mehalah. 'Here is Mrs. De Witt's money, twenty-five pounds.'
'Damnation!' roared Elijah, 'where did you get it?'
'Our savings,' answered Mehalah, and turned her back on him.
CHAPTER XII.
A GILDED BALCONY.
Mehalah was hurt and angry at her mother's conduct. She thought that she had not been fairly treated. When the loss sustained presumably by Abraham Dowsing's carelessness had been discovered, Mrs. Sharland had not hinted the existence of a private store, and had allowed De Witt to lend her the money she wanted for meeting the rent. Glory regarded this conduct as hardly honest. It jarred, at all events, with her sense of what was honourable. On the plea of absolute inability to pay the rent, they had obtained five and twenty pounds from the young fisherman. Then again, when Mrs. De Witt reclaimed the debt, Mehalah had been subjected to the humiliation of appealing to Mr. Pettican and being repulsed by Admonition. She had been further driven to sue a loan of the parson; she had not, indeed, asked him for the money, but that was only because he avoided, intentionally or not she could not say, giving her the chance. She had gone with the intention of begging, and his manner, and the accidental discovery that the sale was already taking place, had alone prevented her from undergoing the shame of asking and being refused.
She did not like to charge her mother with having behaved dishonourably, for she felt instinctively that her mother's views and hers were not coincident. Her brow was clouded, and an unpleasant gleam flickered in her eyes. She resisted the treatment she had been subjected to as unnecessary. It was only justifiable in an extreme emergency, and no such emergency had existed. Her mother would rather sacrifice her daughter's self-respect than break in on the little hoard.
'Charles said he had money in the bank, did he?' asked Mrs. Sharland.