tors.

Mark could hardly endure to see what made the crisis so terribly real.
'That I should have brought you to this!' he said to his wife, when
their visitor had at length bidden them good-night.

'If we begin at that work,' said Annaple, 'it was I who brought you! I
have often thought since it was rather selfish not to have consented to
your helping poor Ursula with her heavy handful of a father! It was
all money grubbing and grabbing, you see, and if we had thought more of
our neighbour than ourselves we might have been luxuriating at the Home
Farm, or even if your uncle had quarrelled with you, he would not have
devoured your substance. I have thought so often, ever since I began
to see this coming.'

'My dear child, you don't mean that you have seen this coming!'

'My prophetic soul! Why, Mark, you have as good as inferred it over
and over again. I've felt like scratching that Badenough whenever I
met him in the street. I must indulge myself by calling him so for
once in strict privacy.'

'You have guessed it all the time, while I only thought how unconscious
you were.'

'Not to say stupid, considering all you told me. Besides, what would
have been the use of howling and moaning and being dismal before the
time? For my part, I could clap my hands even now at getting rid of
Goodenough, and his jaunty, gracious air! Come, Mark, it won't be so
bad after all, you'll see.'

'Nothing can be "so bad," while you are what you are, my Nan.'

'That's right. While we have each other and the Billy-boy, nothing
matters much. There's plenty of work in us both, and that good man
will find it for us; or if he doesn't, we'll get a yellow van, and knit
stockings, and sell them round the country. How jolly that would be!
Imagine Janet's face. There, that's right,' as her mimicry evoked a
smile, 'I should be ashamed to be unhappy about this, when our good
name is saved, and when there is a blessing on the poor,' she added in
a lower voice, tenderly kissing her husband's weary brow.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE BOY OF EGREMONT.

'And the boy that walked beside me,
He could not understand
Why, closer in mine, ah, closer,
I press'd his warm soft hand.'--LONGFELLOW.

The agony of a firm like Greenleaf, Goodenough, and Co. could not be a
rapid thing, and Mr. Dutton lived between London and Micklethwayte for
several weeks, having much to endure on all sides. The senior partners
thought it an almost mali