For his world, too, lay in ruins about him.  Through many hard-working and virtuous years he had counted among the righteous men of the village—­the men whom the Almighty must needs reckon to the good whenever the score of Clinton Magna had to be made up.  And this pre-eminence had come to be part of the habitual furniture of life and thought.  To be suddenly stripped of it—­to be, not only disgraced by his wife, to be thrust down himself among the low and sinful herd—­this thought made another man of him; made him wicked, as it were, perforce.  For who that heard the story would ever believe that he was not the partner of her crime?  Had he not eaten and drunk of it; were not he and his children now clothed by it?

Bessie did not answer him nor look at him.  At any other moment she would have been afraid of him; now she feared nothing but the image in her own mind—­herself led along the village street, enclosed in that hateful building, cut off from all pleasure, all free moving and willing—­alone and despised—­her children taken from her.

Suddenly she walked into the back kitchen and opened the door leading to the garden.

Outside everything lay swathed in white, and a snowstorm was drifting over the deep cup of land which held the village.  A dull, melancholy moonlight seemed to be somewhere behind the snow curtain, for the muffled shapes of the houses below and the long sweep of the hill were visible through the dark, and the objects in the little garden itself were almost distinct.  There, in the centre, rose the round stone edging of the well, the copious well, sunk deep into the chalk, for which Bessie’s neighbours envied her, whence her good nature let them draw freely at any time of drought.  On either side of it the gnarled stems of old fruit-trees and the bare sticks of winter kail made black scratches and blots upon the white.

Bessie looked out, leaning against the doorway, and heedless of the wind that drove upon her.  Down below there was a light in Watson’s cottage, and a few lights from the main street beyond pierced the darkness.  The ‘Spotted Deer’ must be at that moment full of people, all talking of her and Isaac.  Her eye came hastily back to the snow-shrouded well and dwelt upon it.

‘Shut that door!’ Isaac commanded from inside.  She obeyed, and came back into the kitchen.  There she moved restlessly about a minute or two, followed by his frowning look—­the look, not of a husband but of an enemy.  Then a sudden animal yearning for rest and warmth seized her.  She opened the door by the hearth abruptly and went up, longing simply to lie down and cover herself from the cold.