[Illustration:  The Village of Aldbury]

He was too old for the railway, though, and he might have found it hard to get fresh work if he had been staying at Clinton.  But he was not staying.  Poor Eliza wouldn’t last more than a few days; a week or two at most, and he was not going to keep on the cottage after he’d buried her.

Aye, poor Eliza!  She was his sister-in-law, the widow of his second brother.  He had been his brother’s lodger during the greater part of his working life, and since Tom’s death he had stayed on with Eliza.  She and he suited each other, and the ‘worritin childer’ had all gone away years since and left them in peace.  He didn’t believe Eliza knew where any of them were, except Mary, ’married over to Luton’—­and Jim, and Jim’s Louisa.  And a good riddance too.  There was not one of them knew how to keep a shilling when they’d got one.  Still, it was a bit lonesome for Eliza now, with no one but Jim’s Louisa to look after her.

He grew rather downhearted as he trudged along, thinking.  She and he had stuck together ‘a many year.’  There would be nobody left for him to go along with when she was gone.  There was his niece Bessie Costrell and her husband, and there was his silly old cousin Widow Waller.  He dared say they’d both of them want him to live with them.  At the thought a grin crossed his ruddy face.  They both knew about it—­that was what it was.  And he wouldn’t live with either of them, not he.  Not yet a bit, anyway.  All the same, he had a fondness for Bessie and her husband.  Bessie was always very civil to him—­he chuckled again—­and if anything had to be done with it, while he was five miles off at Frampton on a job of work that had been offered him, he didn’t know but he’d as soon trust Isaac Costrell and Bessie as anybody else.  You might call Isaac rather a fool, what with his religion, and ’extempry prayin, an that,’ but all the same Bolderfield thought of him with a kind of uneasy awe.  If ever there was a man secure of the next world it was Isaac Costrell.  His temper, perhaps, was ‘nassty,’ which might pull him down a little when the last account came to be made up; and it could not be said that his elder children had come to much, for all his piety.  But, on the whole, Bolderfield only wished he stood as well with the powers talked about in chapel every Sunday as Isaac did.

As for Bessie, she had been a wasteful woman all her life, with never a bit of money put by, and never a good dress to her back.  But, ’Lor bless yer, there was a many worse folk nor Bessie.’  She wasn’t one of your sour people—­she could make you laugh; she had a merry heart.  Many a pleasant evening had he passed chatting with her and Isaac; and whenever they cooked anything good there was always a bite for him.  Yes, Bessie had been a good niece to him; and if he trusted any one he dared say he’d trust them.

‘Well, how’s Eliza, Muster Bolderfield?’ said a woman who passed him in the village street.