age when public executions still
gratified its human, or inhuman interest--was unable to get relief by
confiding her trouble to others. She dared to say no more than what she
had already said to Uncle Mo, as she knew he was in communication with
his friend the police-officer and she wanted only just as much to be
disclosed about the convict as would safeguard Sapps Court from another
of his visits, but at the same time would not lead to his capture. If
she had thought his suggestions of intimidation serious, no doubt she
would have put aside her scruples, and made it her first object that he
should be brought to justice. But she regarded them as empty threats,
uttered solely to extort money.

She knew she could rely on Mo's kindness of heart to stretch many points
to meet her feelings, but she felt very uncertain whether even his
kind-heartedness would go the length of her demand for it. He might
consider that a wife's feelings for a husband--and _such_ a
husband!--might be carried too far, might even be classified as
superstition, that last infirmity of incorrect minds. If she could only
make sure that the convict should never show his face again in Sapps
Court, she would sacrifice her small remainders of money, earned in runs
of luck, to keep him at a distance. An attitude of compromise between
complete repudiation of him, and misleading his pursuers, was at least
possible. But it involved a slight amount of duplicity in dealing with
Mo, and this made Aunt M'riar supremely uncomfortable. She was perfectly
miserable about it. But there!--had she not committed herself to an
impracticable constancy, with a real altar and a real parson? That was
it. She had promised, five-and-twenty years ago, to love, honour, and
obey a self-engrossed pleasure-seeker, and time and crime and the canker
of a gaol had developed a devil in him, who was by now a fine
representative sample--a "record devil" our modern advanced speech might
have called him--who had fairly stamped out whatever uncongenial trace
of good may have existed originally in the premises he had secured on
an indefinite lease. It _was_ superstition on Aunt M'riar's part, but of
a sort that is aided and abetted by a system that has served the
purposes of the priesthoods all the world over since the world began,
and means to last your time and mine--the more's the pity!

It was the day after her conversation with Mo about the convict--the
day, that is, after Gwen's last v