if other's needed," says he, "and that's this
plaguey thirst of mine, which seizes me when I'm doleful or joyful, with
a force there's no resisting. And chiefly it seizes me in the later part
of the day; therefore, I'd have you take me to the Court to-morrow
morning betimes, ere it's at its worst. My throat's like any limekiln
for dryness now; so do pray, Kit, fasten the door snug, and give me a
mug of ale."

This ended our discussion; but, as it was necessary I should give some
reason for not supping with Moll, I left Dawson with a bottle, and went
up to the house to find Moll. There I learnt that she was still in her
chamber, and sleeping, as Mrs. Butterby believed; so I bade the good
woman tell her mistress when she awoke that Captain Evans had come to
spend the night with me, and he would call to pay her his devoirs the
next morning.

Here, that nothing may be unaccounted for in the sequence of events, I
must depart from my train of present observation to speak from
after-knowledge.

I have said that when Moll started forward, as if to overtake her
husband, she suddenly stopped as if confronted by some menacing spectre.
And this indeed was the case; for at that moment there appeared to her
heated imagination (for no living soul was there) a little, bent old
woman, clothed in a single white garment of Moorish fashion, and Moll
knew that she was Mrs. Godwin (though seeing her now for the first
time), come from Barbary to claim her own, and separate Moll from the
husband she had won by fraud.

She stood there (says Moll) within her gates, with raised hand and a
most bitter, unforgiving look upon her wasted face, barring the way by
which Moll might regain her husband; and as the poor wife halted,
trembling in dreadful awe, the old woman advanced with the sure foot of
right and justice. What reproach she had to make, what malediction to
pronounce, Moll dared not stay to hear, but turning her back fled to the
house, where, gaining her chamber, she locked the door, and flung
herself upon her husband's bed; and in this last dear refuge, shutting
her eyes, clasping her ears, as if by dulling her senses to escape the
phantom, she lay in a convulsion of terror for the mere dread that such
a thing might be.

Then, at the thought that she might never again be enfolded here in her
husband's arms, an agony of grief succeeded her fit of maddening fear,
and she wept till her mind grew calm from sheer exhaustion. And so,
littl