he sporting-papers, as her father had been
wont to do, night after night, with a perplexed brow and an anxious face,
making calculations upon the margin of the print every now and then with
a stump of lead pencil, and chewing the end of it meditatively in the
intervals of his lection.

Although Mrs. Whitelaw did not, like Mrs. Tadman, associate the idea of
the stranger's visit with any apprehension of her husband's impending
ruin, she could not deny that some kind of change had arisen in him since
that event. He had always drunk a good deal, in his slow quiet manner,
which impressed people unacquainted with his habits with a notion of his
sobriety, even when he was steadily emptying the bottle before him; but
he drank more now, and sat longer over his drink, and there was an aspect
of trouble and uneasiness about him at times which fairly puzzled his
wife. Of course the most natural solution for all this was the one
offered by the dismally prophetic Tadman. Stephen Whitelaw had been
speculating or gambling, and his affairs were in disorder. He was not a
man to be affected by anything but the most sordid considerations, one
would suppose. Say that he had lost money, and there you had a key to the
whole.

He got into a habit of sitting up at night, after the rest of the
household had gone to bed. He had done this more or less from the time of
his marriage; and Mrs. Tadman had told Ellen that the habit was one which
had arisen within the last few months.

"He would always see to the fastenings of the house with his own eyes,"
Mrs. Tadman said; "but up to last autumn he used to go upstairs with me
and the servants. It's a new thing for him to sit up drinking his glass
of grog in the parlour by himself."

The new habit seemed to grow upon Mr. Whitelaw more rapidly after that
visit of the stranger's. He took to sitting up till midnight--an awful
hour in a farm-house; and Ellen generally found the spirit-bottle empty
in the morning. Night after night, he went to bed soddened with drink.
Once, when his kinswoman made some feeble remonstrance with him about
this change in his habits, he told her savagely to hold her tongue--he
could afford to drink as much as he pleased--he wasn't likely to come
upon _her_ to pay for what he took. As for his wife, she unhappily cared
nothing what he did. He could not become more obnoxious to her than he
had been from the first hour of her acquaintance with him, let him do
what he would.

L