The habit of obedience to a “lady,” established long ago in years of domestic service, held.  The miserable wife submitted to be fed, looked with forlorn wonder at the children round the fire, and then sank back with a groan.  In her tension of feeling Marcella for an impatient moment thought her a poor creature.  Then with quick remorse she put her arms tenderly round her, raised the dishevelled grey-streaked head on her shoulder, and stooping, kissed the marred face, her own lips quivering.

“You are not alone,” said the girl with her whole soul.  “You shall never be alone while I live.  Now tell me.”

She made the white and gasping woman sit up in a corner of the settle, and she herself got a stool and established herself a little way off, frowning, self-contained, and determined to make out the truth.

“Shall I send the children upstairs?” she asked.

“No!” said the boy, suddenly, in his husky voice, shaking his head with energy, “I’m not a-going.”

“Oh! he’s safe—­is Willie,” said Mrs. Hurd, looking at him, but strangely, and as it were from a long distance, “and the others is too little.”

Then gradually Marcella got the story out of her—­first, the misery of alarm and anxiety in which she had lived ever since the Tudley End raid, owing first to her knowledge of Hurd’s connection with it, and with the gang that had carried it out; then to her appreciation of the quick and ghastly growth of the hatred between him and Westall; lastly, to her sense of ingratitude towards those who had been kind to them.

“I knew we was acting bad towards you.  I told Jim so.  I couldn’t hardly bear to see you come in.  But there, miss,—­I couldn’t do anything.  I tried, oh! the Lord knows I tried!  There was never no happiness between us at last, I talked so.  But I don’t believe he could help himself—­he’s not made like other folks, isn’t Jim—­”

Her features became convulsed again with the struggle for speech.  Marcella reached out for the toil-disfigured hand that was fingering and clutching at the edge of the settle, and held it close.  Gradually she made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over Westall’s discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his restless snatches of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth out of him by degrees.  Her reproaches, her fears, had merely angered and estranged him; her nature had had somehow to accommodate itself to his, lest affection should lose its miserable all.

As to this last fatal attack on the Maxwell coverts, it was clear to Marcella, as she questioned and listened, that the wife had long foreseen it, and that she now knew much more about it than—­suddenly—­she would allow herself to say.  For in the midst of her out-pourings she drew herself together, tried to collect and calm herself, looked at Marcella with an agonised, suspicious eye, and fell silent.