er'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 gaol,' she said, under her breath. 'I'll not--'

A sound of scorn broke from Isaac.

'You 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 _you_! 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 'ud 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?

Bessie did not answer him nor look at him. At any other moment she would
have been afraid of him; now she feared nothing but the image in her own
mind--herself led along the village street, enclosed in that hateful
building, cut off from all pleasure, all free moving and willing--alone
and despised--her children taken from her.

Suddenly she walked into the back kitchen and opened the door leading to
the garden.

Outside everything lay swathed in white, and a snowstorm was drifting
over the deep cup of land which held the village. A dull, melancholy
moonlight seemed to be somewhere behind the snow curtain, for the
muffled shapes of the houses below and the long sweep of the hill were
visible through the dark, and the objects in the little garden itself
were almost distinct.