Then, inconsequently, he began to think of his father’s death.  He made a good end did the old man.  “Jim, my lad, the Lord’s verra merciful,” or “Jim, you’ll look after Ann.”  Ann was the only daughter.  Then a sigh or two, and a bit of sleep, and it was done.

And everybody must go the same way, must come to the same stopping of the breath, the same awfulness—­in a life of blind habit—­of a moment that never had been before and never could be again?  He did not put it to these words, but the shudder that is in the thought for all of us, seized him.  He was very apt to think of dying, to ponder in his secret heart how it would be, and when.  And always it made him very soft towards Minta and the children.  Not only did the life instinct cling to them, to the warm human hands and faces hemming him in and protecting him from that darkness beyond with its shapes of terror.  But to think of himself as sick, and gasping to his end, like his father, was to put himself back in his old relation to his wife, when they were first married.  He might cross Minta now, but if he came to lie sick, he could see himself there, in the future, following her about with his eyes, and thanking her, and doing all she told him, just as he’d used to do.  He couldn’t die without her to help him through.  The very idea of her being taken first, roused in him a kind of spasm—­a fierceness, a clenching of the hands.  But all the same, in this poaching matter, he must have, his way, and she must just get used to it.

Ah! a low whistle from the further side of the wood.  He replied, and was almost instantly joined by a tall slouching youth, by day a blacksmith’s apprentice at Gairsley, the Maxwells’ village, who had often brought him information before.

The two sat talking for ten minutes or so on the log.  Then they parted; Hurd went back to the ditch where he had left the game, put two rabbits into his pockets, left the other two to be removed in the morning when he came to look at his snares, and went off home, keeping as much as possible in the shelter of the hedges.  On one occasion he braved the moonlight and the open field, rather than pass through a woody corner where an old farmer had been found dead some six years before.  Then he reached a deep lane leading to the village, and was soon at his own door.

As he climbed the wooden ladder leading to the one bedroom where he, his wife, and his four children slept, his wife sprang up in bed.

“Jim, you must be perished—­such a night as ‘t is.  Oh, Jim—­where ha’ you bin?”

She was a miserable figure in her coarse nightgown, with her grizzling hair wild about her, and her thin arms nervously outstretched along the bed.  The room was freezing cold, and the moonlight stealing through the scanty bits of curtains brought into dismal clearness the squalid bed, the stained walls, and bare uneven floor.  On an iron bedstead, at the foot of the large bed, lay Willie, restless and coughing, with the elder girl beside him fast asleep; the other girl lay beside her mother, and the wooden box with rockers, which held the baby, stood within reach of Mrs. Hurd’s arm.