as I had never believed it possible he could utter,
that she should not sleep under his roof that night. It was hopeless
to attempt to appease him. He put her out at the door with his own hand
that very day. She was an excellent and a regular workwoman, but sullen
and revengeful when her temper was once roused. By the next morning our
disgrace was known all over Dibbledean.

"There was only one more degradation now to be dreaded; and that it
sickened me to think of. I knew Joshua well enough to know that if he
found the lost wretch he was going in search of, he would absolutely
and certainly bring her home again. I had been born in our house at
Dibbledean; my mother before me had been born there; our family had
lived in the old place, honestly and reputably, without so much as
a breath of ill report ever breathing over them, for generations and
generations back. When I thought of this, and then thought of the
bare possibility that an abandoned woman might soon be admitted, and a
bastard child born, in the house where so many of my relations had lived
virtuously and died righteously, I resolved that the day when _she_ set
her foot on our threshold, should be the day when _I_ left my home and
my birth place for ever.

"While I was in this mind, Joshua came to me--as determined in his way
as I secretly was in mine--to ask if I had any suspicions about what
direction she had taken. All the first inquiries after her that he had
made in Dibbledean, had, it seems, given him no information whatever. I
said I had no positive knowledge (which was strictly true), but told him
I suspected she was gone to London. He asked why? I answered, because I
believed she was gone to look after Mr. Carr; and said that I remembered
his letter to her (the first and only one she received) had a London
post-mark upon it. We could not find this letter at the time: the
hiding-place she had for it, and for all the others she left behind her,
was not discovered till years after, when the house was repaired for the
people who bought our business. Joshua, however, having nothing better
to guide himself by, and being resolved to begin seeking her at once,
said my suspicion was a likely one; and went away to London by that
night's coach, to see what he could do, and to get advice from his
lawyers about how to trace her.

"This, which I have been just relating, is the only part of my conduct,
in the time of our calamity, which I now think of with an unea