That's a queer way of showin' off--with a knife! P'r'aps it warn't
open, though?" But it _was_, by M'riar's silence. "Anyways," Mo
continued, "he won't come back so long as he thinks I'm here. To-morrow
morning first thing I shall just drop round to the Station, and tip 'em
a wink. Can't have this sort o' thing goin' on!"

M'riar's lighting of a candle seemed to hang fire. Said she:--"You'd
think it a queer thing to say, if I was to say it, Mo!" And then, in
reply to the natural question:--"Think what?" she continued:--"A woman's
husband ain't like any other man. She's never quite done with him, as if
he was nobody. It don't make any odds how bad he's been, nor yet how
long ago it was.... It makes one creep to think...." She stopped
abruptly, and shuddered.

"What he'll catch if he gets his deserts." Mo supplied an end for the
sentence, gravely.

"Ah!--he might be.... What _would_ it be, Mo, if he was tried and found
guilty?"

"Without a recommendation to mercy? It was a capital offence. I never
told it ye. Shall I tell it?"

"No--for God's sake!" Aunt M'riar stopped her ears tight as she had done
before. "Don't you tell me nothing, Mo, more than I know already. That's
plenty." Uncle Mo nodded, pointed to tightly closed lips to express
assent, and she resumed speech with hearing. "Capital offence means ...
means?..."

"Means he would go to the scragging-post, arter breakfast one morning.
There's no steering out o' _that_ fix, M'riar. He's just got to, one
day, and there's an end of it!"

"And how ever could I be off knowing it at the time? Oh, but it makes me
sick to think of! The night before--the night before, Mo! Supposin' I
wake in the night, and think of him, and hear the clocks strike! He'll
hear them too, Mo."

"Can't be off it, M'riar! But what of that? _He_ won't be a penny the
worse, and he'll know what o'clock it is." Remember that Uncle Mo had
some particulars of Daverill's career that Aunt M'riar had not. For all
she knew, the criminal's capital offence might have been an innocent
murder--a miscarriage in the redistribution of some property--a too
zealous garrotting of some fat old stockjobber. "I'm thinkin' a bit of
the other party, M'riar," said Mo. He might have said more, but he was
brought up short by his pledge to say nothing of the convict's last
atrocity. How could he speak the thought in his mind, of the mother of
the victim in a madhouse? For that had made part of the tale, as it had
re