But she believed he had begun to notice the drink.  Drinking was universal in Clinton, though there was not much drunkenness.  Teetotallers were unknown, and Isaac himself drank his beer freely, and a glass of spirits, like anybody else on occasion.  She had been used for years to fetch his beer from the public, and she had been careful.  But there were signs—­

Oh! if she could only think of some way of putting it back—­this thirty-odd pounds.  She held her head between her hands, thinking and thinking.  Couldn’t that little lawyer man to whom she went every month at Bedford, to fetch her legacy money—­couldn’t he lend it her, and keep her money till it was paid?  She could make up a story, and give him something for himself to induce him to hold his tongue.  She had thought of this often before, but never so urgently as now.  She would take the carrier’s cart to Bedford next day, while Isaac was at work, and try.

Yet all the time despair was at her heart.  So hard to undo!  Yet how easy it had been to take and to spend.  She thought of that day in September, when she had got the news of her legacy—­six shillings a week from an old aunt—­her father’s aunt, whose very existence she had forgotten.  The wild delight of it!  Isaac got sixteen shillings a week in wages—­here was nearly half as much again.  She was warned that it would come to an end in two years.  But none the less it seemed to her a fortune—­and all her life, before it came, mere hard pinching and endurance.  She had always been one to spend where she could.  Old John had often rated her for it.  So had Isaac.  But that was his money.  This was hers, and he who, for religious reasons, had never made friends with or thought well of any of her family, instinctively disliked the money which had come from them, and made few inquiries into the spending of it.

Oh! the joy of those first visits to Frampton, when all the shops had seemed to be there for her, and she their natural mistress!  How ready people had been to trust her in the village!  How tempting it had been to brag and make a mystery!  That old skinflint, Mrs. Moulsey, at ’the shop,’ she had been all sugar and sweets then.

And a few weeks later—­six, seven weeks later—­about the beginning of October, these halcyon days had all come to an end.  She owed what she could not pay—­people had ceased to smile upon her—­she was harassed, excited, worried out of her life.

Old familiar wonder of such a temperament!  How can it be so easy to spend, so delightful to promise, and so unreasonably, so unjustly difficult, to pay?

She began to be mortally afraid of Isaac—­of the effect of disclosures.  One night she was alone in the cottage, almost beside herself under the pressure of one or two claims she could not meet—­one claim especially, that of a little jeweller, from whom she had bought a gold ring and a brooch at Frampton—­when the thought of John’s hoard swept upon her—­ clutched her like something living and tyrannical, not to be shaken off.  It struck her all in an instant that there was another cupboard in the little parlour, exactly like that on the stairs.  The lower cupboard had a key—­what if it fitted?