“Nay, if there had been a big family, she would varry likely hev been at her loom today”—­then there were a few softly spoken words, and John walked forward, but he could not forget how singularly the empty loom had appealed to him on that last morning he had walked through the mill with Greenwood.  There are strange coincidences and links in events of which we know nothing at all—­occult, untraceable altogether, material, yet having distinct influences not over matter but over some one mind or heart.

A little before closing time Greenwood said, “Julius Yorke will be spreading himself all over Hatton tonight.  A word or two from thee, sir, might settle him a bit.”

“I think you settled him very well last night.”

“It suited me to do so.  I like to threep a man that is my equal in his head piece.  Yorke is nobbut a hunchbacked dwarf and he talks a lot of nonsense, but he feels all he says.  He’s just a bit of crooked humanity on fire and talking at white heat.”

“What was he talking about?”

“Rights and wrongs, of course.  There was a good deal of truth in what he said, but he used words I didn’t like; they came out of some blackguard’s dictionary, so I told him to be quiet, and when he wouldn’t be quiet, we sung him down with a verse out o’ John Wesley’s hymn-book.”

“All right!  You are a match for Yorke, Greenwood.  I will leave him to you.  I am very weary.  The last two days have been hard ones.”

There was a tone of pathos in John’s words and voice and Greenwood realized it.  He touched his cap, and turned away.  “Married men hev their own tribulations,” he muttered.  “I hev had a heartache mysen all day long about the way Polly went on this morning.  And her with such a good husband as I am!”

Greenwood went home to such discouraging reflections, and John’s were just as discomforting.  For he had left his wife on the previous night, in a distressed unsettled condition, and he felt that there was now something in Jane’s, and his own, past which must not be referred to, and indeed he had promised himself never to name it.

But a past that is buried alive is a difficult ghost to lay, and he feared Jane would not be satisfied until she had opened the dismal grave of their dead happiness again—­and perhaps again and again.  He set his lips straight and firm during this reflection, and said something of which only the last four words were audible, “Thy grace is sufficient.”

However, there was no trace of a disposition to resume a painful argument in Jane’s words or attitude.  She looked pale from headache and wakefulness, but was dressed with her usual care, and was even more than usually solicitous about his comfort and satisfaction.  Still John noticed the false note of make-believe through all her attentions and he was hardly sorry when she ended a conversation about Harry’s affairs by a sudden and unexpected reversion to her own.