ss of
spirits, like anybody else, on occasion. She had been used for years to
fetch his beer from the public, and she had been careful. But there were
signs----

Oh! if she could only think of some way of putting it back--this thirty
odd pounds. She held her head between her hands, thinking and thinking.
Couldn't that little lawyer man to whom she went every month at Bedford,
to fetch her legacy money--couldn't he lend it her, and keep her money
till it was paid? She could make up a story, and give him something for
himself to induce him to hold his tongue. She had thought of this often
before, but never so urgently as now. She would take the carrier's cart
to Bedford next day, while Isaac was at work, and try.

Yet all the time despair was at her heart. So hard to undo! Yet how
easy it had been to take and to spend. She thought of that day in
September, when she had got the news of her legacy--six shillings a week
from an old aunt--her father's aunt, whose very existence she had
forgotten. The wild delight of it! Isaac got sixteen shillings a week
in wages--here was nearly half as much again. She was warned that it
would come to an end in two years. But none the less it seemed to her a
fortune--and all her life, before it came, mere hard pinching and
endurance. She had always been one to spend where she could. Old John
had often rated her for it. So had Isaac. But that was his money. This
was hers, and he who, for religious reasons, had never made friends with
or thought well of any of her family, instinctively disliked the money
which had come from them, and made few inquiries into the spending of it.

Oh! the joy of those first visits to Frampton, when all the shops had
seemed to be there for her, and she their natural mistress! How ready
people had been to trust her in the village! How tempting it had been to
brag and make a mystery! That old skinflint, Mrs. Moulsey, at "the
shop," she had been all sugar and sweets _then_.

And a few weeks later--six, seven weeks later--about the beginning of
October, these halcyon days had all come to an end. She owed what she
could not pay--people had ceased to smile upon her--she was harassed,
excited, worried out of her life.

Old familiar wonder of such a temperament! How can it be so easy to
spend, so delightful to promise, and so unreasonably, so unjustly
difficult, to pay?

She began to be mortally afraid of Isaac--of the effect of disclosures.