aper
transactions, of any routine that checks his free will and frightens his
inexperience. He was still eagerly thinking when the light began to
flood into his room, and before he could compose himself to sleep the
women called him.

But he shed no more tears. He saw Eliza die, his companion of forty
years, and hardly felt it. What troubled him all through the last scene
was the thought that now he should never know why she was so set against
'Bessie's 'avin it.'

SCENE II

It was, indeed, the general opinion in Clinton Magna that John
Bolderfield--or 'Borrofull,' as the village pronounced it, took his
sister-in-law's death too lightly. The women especially pronounced him a
hard heart. Here was 'poor Eliza' gone, Eliza who had kept him decent
and comfortable for forty years, ever since he was a lad, and he could
go about whistling, and--to talk to him--as gay as a lark! Yet John
contributed handsomely to the burial expenses--Eliza having already,
through her burial club, provided herself with a more than regulation
interment; and he gave Jim's Louisa her mourning. Nevertheless these
things did not avail. It was felt instinctively that he was not beaten
down as he ought to have been, and Mrs. Saunders, the smith's wife, was
applauded when she said to her neighbours that 'you couldn't expeck a
man with John Bolderfield's money to have as many feelins as other
people.' Whence it would seem that the capitalist is no more truly
popular in small societies than in large.

John, however, did not trouble himself about these things. He was hard
at work harvesting for Muster Hill's widow, and puzzling his head day
and night as to what to do with his box.

When the last field had been carried and the harvest supper was over, he
came home late, and wearied out. His working life at Clinton Magna was
done; and the family he had worked for so long was broken up in distress
and poverty. Yet he felt only a secret exultation. Such toil and effort
behind--such a dreamland in front!

Next day he set to work to wind up his affairs. The furniture of the
cottage was left to Eliza's son Jim, and the daughter had arranged for
the carting of it to the house twelve miles off where her parents lived.
She was to go with it on the morrow, and John would give up the cottage
and walk over to Frampton, where he had already secured a lodging.

Only twenty-four hours!--and he had not yet decided. Which was it to be
--Saunders after all--or