make out the truth.

"Shall I send the children upstairs?" she asked.

"No!" said the boy, suddenly, in his husky voice, shaking his head with
energy, "I'm not a-going."

"Oh! he's safe--is Willie," said Mrs. Hurd, looking at him, but
strangely, and as it were from a long distance, "and the others is too
little."

Then gradually Marcella got the story out of her--first, the misery of
alarm and anxiety in which she had lived ever since the Tudley End raid,
owing first to her knowledge of Hurd's connection with it, and with the
gang that had carried it out; then to her appreciation of the quick and
ghastly growth of the hatred between him and Westall; lastly, to her
sense of ingratitude towards those who had been kind to them.

"I knew we was acting bad towards you. I told Jim so. I couldn't hardly
bear to see you come in. But there, miss,--I couldn't do anything. I
tried, oh! the Lord knows I tried! There was never no happiness between
us at last, I talked so. But I don't believe he could help himself--he's
not made like other folks, isn't Jim--"

Her features became convulsed again with the struggle for speech.
Marcella reached out for the toil-disfigured hand that was fingering and
clutching at the edge of the settle, and held it close. Gradually she
made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his
night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford
gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over
Westall's discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his
restless snatches of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth
out of him by degrees. Her reproaches, her fears, had merely angered and
estranged him; her nature had had somehow to accommodate itself to his,
lest affection should lose its miserable all.

As to this last fatal attack on the Maxwell coverts, it was clear to
Marcella, as she questioned and listened, that the wife had
long foreseen it, and that she now knew much more about it
than--suddenly--she would allow herself to say. For in the midst of her
out-pourings she drew herself together, tried to collect and calm
herself, looked at Marcella with an agonised, suspicious eye, and fell
silent.

"I don't know nothing about it, miss," she stubbornly declared at last,
with an inconsequent absurdity which smote Marcella's pity afresh. "How
am I to know? There was seven o' them Oxford fellows at Tudley End--that
I know. Who