lness--in a life of blind habit--of a moment
that never had been before and never could be again? He did not put it
to these words, but the shudder that is in the thought for all of us,
seized him. He was very apt to think of dying, to ponder in his secret
heart _how_ it would be, and when. And always it made him very soft
towards Minta and the children. Not only did the _life_ instinct cling
to them, to the warm human hands and faces hemming him in and protecting
him from that darkness beyond with its shapes of terror. But to think of
himself as sick, and gasping to his end, like his father, was to put
himself back in his old relation to his wife, when they were first
married. He might cross Minta now, but if he came to lie sick, he could
see himself there, in the future, following her about with his eyes, and
thanking her, and doing all she told him, just as he'd used to do. He
couldn't die without her to help him through. The very idea of her being
taken first, roused in him a kind of spasm--a fierceness, a clenching of
the hands. But all the same, in this poaching matter, he must have, his
way, and she must just get used to it.

Ah! a low whistle from the further side of the wood. He replied, and was
almost instantly joined by a tall slouching youth, by day a blacksmith's
apprentice at Gairsley, the Maxwells' village, who had often brought him
information before.

The two sat talking for ten minutes or so on the log. Then they parted;
Hurd went back to the ditch where he had left the game, put two rabbits
into his pockets, left the other two to be removed in the morning when
he came to look at his snares, and went off home, keeping as much as
possible in the shelter of the hedges. On one occasion he braved the
moonlight and the open field, rather than pass through a woody corner
where an old farmer had been found dead some six years before. Then he
reached a deep lane leading to the village, and was soon at his own
door.

As he climbed the wooden ladder leading to the one bedroom where he, his
wife, and his four children slept, his wife sprang up in bed.

"Jim, you must be perished--such a night as 't is. Oh, Jim--where ha'
you bin?"

She was a miserable figure in her coarse nightgown, with her grizzling
hair wild about her, and her thin arms nervously outstretched along the
bed. The room was freezing cold, and the moonlight stealing through the
scanty bits of curtains brought into dismal clearness the squalid