eak, and he sat on beside her,
looking at her pale face, and torn, as the silent minutes passed, between
conflicting impulses. He had just passed an hour listening to a good
man's plain narrative of a life spent for Christ, amid fever-swamps, and
human beings more deadly still. The vicar's friend was a missionary
bishop, and a High Churchman; Isaac, as a staunch Dissenter by conviction
and inheritance, thought ill both of bishops and Ritualists.
Nevertheless, he had been touched; he had been fired. Deep, though often
perplexed, instincts in his own heart had responded to the spiritual
passion of the speaker. The religious atmosphere had stolen about him,
melting and subduing.

And the first effect of it had been to quicken suddenly his domestic
conscience; to make him think painfully of Bessie and the children as he
climbed the hill. Was his wife going the way of his son? And he,
sitting day after day like a dumb dog, instead of striving with her!

He made up his mind hurriedly. "Bessie," he said, stooping to her and
speaking in a strange voice, "Bessie, had yer been to Dawson's?"

Dawson was the landlord of the Spotted Deer.

Bessie was long in answering. At last she said, almost inaudibly--

"Yes."

She fully understood what he had meant by the question, and she wondered
whether he would fall into one of his rages and beat her.

Instead, his hand sought clumsily for hers.

"Bessie, yer shouldn't; yer mustn't do it no more; it'll make a bad woman
of yer. I know as I'm not good to live with; I don't make things
pleasant to yer; but I've been thinkin'; I'll try if yo'll try."

Bessie burst into tears. It seemed as though her life were breaking
within her. Never since their early married days had he spoken to her
like this. And she was in such piteous need of comfort; of some strong
hand to help her out of the black pit in which she lay. The wild impulse
crossed her to sit up and tell him--to throw it all on Timothy, to show
him the cupboard and the box. Should she tell him; brave it all now that
he was like this? Between them they might find a way--make it good.

Then the thought of the man in the public-house, of the half-crowns, a
host of confused and guilty memories, swept upon her. How could she ever
get herself out of it? Her heart beat so that it seemed a live creature
strangling and silencing her. She was still fighting with her tears and
her terror when she heard Isaac say--

"I know