“There’s worse bein’ done by Polpier women than holding the men back. I call it worse, at any rate, to send your wedded husband off to fight for his country and then pick up with another man for protection.”

“Can such goin’s-on go on in our midst, ma’am, and nothing about in the shape o’ fire and brimstone?”

“I am not retailing gossip, Mr Latter.  I tell you no more than was openly said to me, and brazenly, before witnesses, by one of the parties involved.  As one of the Relief Committee appointed to see that none of our reservists’ families are suffering want, I called the other day upon Samuel Penhaligon’s wife.  From the first the woman showed no sense of our respective positions; and after a question or two she became so violent that it drew quite a small crowd around the door.  In the midst of her tirading out steps her partner—­”

“What?  Sam?”

“How should it be Samuel Penhaligon, when you know as well as I do that he’s gone to the War?  No:  the man, I regret to say, was Nicholas Nanjivell.”

“Nicky-Nan? . . .  Oh, come, ma’am, I say!  Why, what capers could he been cuttin’?”

“I feel justified in speaking of him as her partner, seeing that he avowed as much.  She was living under his protection, he said, and he would see that she didn’t come to want.  He had even the effrontery to assure me that he had made an arrangement with Penhaligon.  But that, I feel sure, was a shameless lie, and my ears tingle to hear myself repeating it.  ’Twas hard enough to keep one’s temper with the man standing there and talking big as my lord, when the Almighty knows if for these two years he’s seen the colour of a sovereign. . . .  Eh?  What ails you?” she demanded, as Mr Latter, who had been testing the point of the auger with his thumb, gave a sudden and violent start.

“Thank ’ee, ma’am—­there’s no blood drawn, as it happens,” said Mr Latter, “but ’twas nibby-jibby,[1] the way you outed with it, and took me of a heap.  If you’d ever happened now to stand up to a man and him gettin’ his fist full on your wind—­no, you wouldn’t, o’ course.  But ’twas a knock-out. . . .  ‘Nicky-Nan,’ says you, ’an’not a sovereign to bless hisself’—­Why the man’s fairly leakin sovereigns!—­sheddin’ ’em about like fish-scales!”

“Mr Latter—­are you intoxicated?”

“I wish I was, ma’am.  ’Twould be some kind of an explanation, though mebbe not the most satisfactory. . . .  When I tell you that the man walked into my bar, three days since, an’ scattered sovereigns all over my floor!  When I tell you he couldn’ pull out a han’kerchief to blow his nose but he sneezed sovereigns!”

Mrs Polsue gasped.