Poor Grace!  Her sorrows had been thickening fast during the last few months.  She was schoolmistress again, true; but where were her children?  Those of them whom she loved best, were swept away by the cholera; and could she face the remnant, each in mourning for a parent or a brother?  That alone was grief enough for her; and yet that was the lightest of all her griefs.  She loved Tom Thurnall—­how much, she dared not tell herself; she longed to “save” him.  She had thought, and not untruly, during the past cholera weeks, that he was softened, opened to new impressions:  but he had avoided her more than ever—­perhaps suspected her again more than ever—­and now he was gone, gone for ever.  That, too, was grief enough alone.  But darkest and deepest of all, darker and deeper than the past shame of being suspected by him she loved, was the shame of suspecting her own mother—­of believing herself, as she did, privy to that shameful theft, and yet unable to make restitution.  There was the horror of all horrors, the close prison which seemed to stifle her whole soul.  The only chink through which a breath of air seemed to come, and keep her heart alive, was the hope that somehow, somewhere, she might find that belt, and restore it without her mother’s knowledge.

But more—­the first of September was come and gone; the bill for five-and-twenty pounds was due, and was not met.  Grace, choking down her honest pride, went off to the grocer, and, with tears which he could not resist, persuaded him to renew the bill for one month more; and now that month was all but past, and yet there was no money.  Eight or ten people who owed Mrs. Harvey money had died of the cholera.  Some, of course, had left no effects; and all hope of their working out their debts was gone.  Some had left money behind them:  but it was still in the lawyer’s hands, some of it at sea, some on mortgage, some in houses which must be sold; till their affairs were wound up—­(a sadly slow affair when a country attorney has a poor man’s unprofitable business to transact)—­nothing could come in to Mrs. Harvey.  To and fro she went with knitted brow and heavy heart; and brought home again only promises, as she had done a hundred times before.  One day she went up to Mrs. Heale.  Old Heale owed her thirteen pounds and more:  but that was not the least reason for paying.  His cholera patients had not paid him; and whether Heale had the money by him or not, he was not going to pay his debts till other people paid theirs.  Mrs. Harvey stormed; Mrs. Heale gave her as good as she brought; and Mrs. Harvey threatened to County Court her husband; whereon Mrs. Heale, en revanche dragged out the books, and displayed to the poor widow’s horror-struck eyes an account for medicine and attendance, on her and Grace, which nearly swallowed up the debt.  Poor Grace was overwhelmed when her mother came home and upbraided her, in her despair, with being a burden.  Was she not a burden?  Must she not be one henceforth?  No, she would take in needlework, labour in the fields, heave ballast among the coarse pauper-girls on the quay-pool, anything rather:  but how to meet the present difficulty?