When he took his departure it was settled that she should, with her husband’s permission, go over to Chesterton for a couple of nights in the course of the next week; but that she could not fix the day till she had seen him.  Then, when he was taking his departure and kissing her once again, she whispered a word to him.  ’Try and be charitable, William.  I sometimes think that at Chesterton we hardly knew what charity meant.’

That evening the proposed visit to Chesterton was discussed at Folking.  The old man had very strongly taken up his son’s side, and was of opinion that the Boltons were not only uncharitable, but perversely ill-conditioned in the view which they took.  To his thinking, Crinkett, Adamson, and the woman were greedy, fraudulent scoundrels, who had brought forward this charge solely with the view of extorting money.  He declared that the very fact that they had begun by asking for money should have barred their evidence before any magistrates.  The oaths of the four ‘scoundrels’ were, according to him, worth nothing.  The scrap of paper purporting to be a copy of the marriage certificate, and the clergyman’s pretended letter, were mere forgeries, having about them no evidence or probability of truth.  Any one could have written them.  As to that envelope addressed to Mrs. Caldigate, with the Sydney postmark, he had his own theory.  He thought but little of the intercourse which his son acknowledged with the woman, but was of opinion that his son ’had been an ass’ in writing those words.  But a man does not marry a woman by simply writing his own name with the word mistress prefixed to it on an envelope.  Any other woman might have adduced the envelope as evidence of his marriage with her!  It was, he said, monstrous that any one should give credence to such bundles of lies.  Therefore his words were gospel, and his wishes were laws to Hester.  She clung round him, and hovered over him, and patted him like a very daughter, insisting that he should nurse the baby, and talking of him to her husband as though he were manifestly the wisest man in Cambridgeshire.  She forgot even that little flaw in his religious belief.  To her thinking at the present moment, a man who would believe that her baby was the honest son of an honest father and mother had almost religion enough for all purposes.

‘Quite right that you should go,’ said the old man.

‘I think so,’ said the husband, ’though I am afraid they will trouble her.’

‘The only question is whether they will let her come back.’

‘What!’ exclaimed Hester.

‘Whether they won’t keep you when they’ve got you.’

’I won’t be kept.  I will come back.  You don’t suppose I’d let them talk me over?’

’No, my dear; I don’t think they’ll be able to do that.  But there are such things as bolts and bars.’

‘Impossible!’ said his son.

‘Do you mean that they’ll send me to prison?’ asked Hester.