he truth, but made no remark except to ask me if I would give them
a drop of cider. I answered sharply that I had no cider in the house,
having no fear of the consequences of refusing them drink, because
I knew that plenty of men were at work within hail, in a neighboring
quarry. The two looked at each other again when I denied having any
cider to give them; and Jerry (as I am obliged to call him, knowing no
other name by which to distinguish the fellow) took off his cap to me
once more, and, with a kind of blackguard gentility upon him, said they
would have the pleasure of calling the next day, when my father was
at home. I said good-afternoon as ungraciously as possible, and, to my
great relief, they both left the cottage immediately afterward.

As soon as they were well away, I watched them from the door. They
trudged off in the direction of Moor Farm; and, as it was beginning to
get dusk, I soon lost sight of them.

Half an hour afterward I looked out again.

The wind had lulled with the sunset, but the mist was rising, and a
heavy rain was beginning to fall. Never did the lonely prospect of the
moor look so dreary as it looked to my eyes that evening. Never did I
regret any slight thing more sincerely than I then regretted the leaving
of Mr. Knifton's pocketbook in my charge. I cannot say that I suffered
under any actual alarm, for I felt next to certain that neither Shifty
Dick nor Jerry had got a chance of setting eyes on so small a thing as
the pocketbook while they were in the kitchen; but there was a kind
of vague distrust troubling me--a suspicion of the night--a dislike of
being left by myself, which I never remember having experienced before.
This feeling so increased after I had closed the door and gone back
to the kitchen, that, when I heard the voices of the quarrymen as they
passed our cottage on their way home to the village in the valley below
Moor Farm, I stepped out into the passage with a momentary notion
of telling them how I was situated, and asking them for advice and
protection.

I had hardly formed this idea, however, before I dismissed it. None
of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a nodding
acquaintance with them, and believed them to be honest men, as times
went. But my own common sense told me that what little knowledge of
their characters I had was by no means sufficient to warrant me in
admitting them into my confidence in the matter of the pocketbook. I had
seen enou