‘It is the old man’s bread,’ said this older man, weakly.

‘What matter?  It is the bread of adultery.’  It may certainly be said that at this time Mrs. Bolton herself would have been relieved from none of her sufferings by any new evidence which would have shown that Crinkett and the others had sworn falsely.  Though she loved her daughter dearly, though her daughter’s misery made her miserable, yet she did not wish to restore the husband to the wife.  Any allusion to a possibility that the verdict had been a mistaken verdict was distasteful to her.  Her own original opinion respecting Caldigate had been made good by the verdict.  The verdict had proved her to be right, and her husband with all his sons to have been wrong.  The triumph had been very dark to her; but still it had been a triumph.  It was to her an established fact that John Caldigate was not her daughter’s husband and therefore she was anxious, not to rehabilitate her daughter’s position, but to receive her own miserable child once more beneath the shelter of her own wing.  That they two might pray together, struggle together, together wear their sackcloth and ashes, and together console themselves with their hopes of eternal joys, while they shuddered, not altogether uncomfortably, at the torments prepared for others,—­this was now the only outlook in which she could find a gleam of satisfaction; and she was so assured of the reasonableness of her wishes, so convinced that the house of her parents was now the only house in which Hester could live without running counter to the precepts of her own religion, and counter also to the rules of the wicked outside world, that she could not bring herself to believe but that she would succeed at last.  Merely to ask her child to come, to repeat the invitation, and then to take a refusal, was by no means sufficient for her energy.  She had failed grievously when she had endeavoured to make her daughter a prisoner at the Grange.  After such an attempt as that, it could hardly be thought that ordinary invitations would be efficacious.  But when that attempt had been made, it was possible that Hester should justify herself by the law.  According to law she had then been Caldigate’s wife.  There had been some ground for her to stand upon as a wife, and as a wife she had stood upon it very firmly.  But now there was not an inch of ground.  The man had been convicted as a bigamist, and the other woman, the first woman, had been proved to be his wife.  Mrs. Bolton had got it into her head that the two had been dissevered as though by some supernal power; and no explanation to the contrary, brought to her by her husband from Robert, had any power of shaking her conviction.  It was manifest to all men and to all women, that she who had been seduced, betrayed, and sacrificed should now return with her innocent babe to the protection of her father’s roof; and no stone must be left unturned till the unfortunate one had been made to understand her duty.