and ministering to
all his little comforts; she would make no difference: and when he saw
the poor dove move about him so heavily, and rather languidly, yet so
zealously and tenderly, the man's very bowels yearned over her, and he
felt as if he could die to do her a service.

So, one day, when she was standing by him, bending over his little round
table, and filling his pipe with her neat hand, he took her by the other
hand and drew her gently on his knee, her burden and all. "Child!" said
he, "do not thou fret. I know how to get money; and I'll do 't, for thy
sake."

"I know that," said she, softly; "can I not read thy face by this time?"
and so laid her cheek to his. "But, Thomas, for my sake, get it
honestly,--or not at all," said she, still filling his pipe, with her
cheek to his.

"I'll but take back my own," said he; "fear naught."

But, after thus positively pledging himself to Mercy, he became
thoughtful and rather fretful; for he was still most averse to go to
Hernshaw, and yet could hit upon no other way; since to employ an agent
would be to let out that he had committed bigamy, and so risk his own
neck, and break Mercy's heart.

After all his scale was turned by his foible.

Mrs. Vint had been weak enough to confide her trouble to a friend: it
was all over the parish in three days.

Well, one day, in the kitchen of the Inn, Paul Carrick, having drunk two
pints of good ale, said to Vint, "Landlord, you ought to have married
her to me, I've got two hundred pounds laid by. I'd have pulled you out
of the mire, and welcome."

"Would you, though, Paul?" said Harry Vint; "then, by G--, I wish I
had."

Now Carrick bawled that out, and Griffith, who was at the door, heard
it.

He walked into the kitchen, ghastly pale, and spoke to Harry Vint first.

"I take your inn, your farm, and your debts on me," said he; "not one
without t' other."

"Spoke like a man!" cried the landlord, joyfully; "and so be it--before
these witnesses."

Griffith turned on Carrick: "This house is mine. Get out on 't, ye
_jealous_, mischief-making cur." And he took him by the collar and
dragged him furiously out of the place, and sent him whirling into the
middle of the road; then ran back for his hat and flung it out after
him.

This done, he sat down boiling, and his eyes roved fiercely round the
room in search of some other antagonist. But his strength was so great,
and his face so altered with this sudden spasm of reviving