But another cause that lengthened out the minute, was the embarrassing business of where to find the change.  Bacchus’s didn’t chalk up trust, where hard money was flung upon the counter; but all the accumulated wealth of Bacchus’s high-priest, Tom Swipey, and of the seven worshippers now drinking in his honour, could not suffice to make up enough of change:  therefore, after two gallons left behind him in libations as aforesaid, and two more bottled up for a drink-offering at home, Roger was contented to be owed seven and fourpence; a debt never likely to be liquidated.  Much speculation this afforded to the gossips; and when the treater’s back was turned, they touched their foreheads, for the man was clearly crazed, and they winked to each other with a gesture of significance.

Grace, while musing on her new half-crown—­it was strange how long she looked at it—­had heard with real amazement that uproarious huzzaing! and, just as her father had levanted for the beer, glided down from her closet, and received the wondrous tidings from her step-mother.  She heard in silence, if not in sadness:  intuitive good sense proclaimed to her that this sudden gush of wealth was a temptation, even if she felt no secret fears on the score of—­shall we call it superstition?—­that dream, this crock, that dark angel—­and this so changed spirit of her once religious father:  what could she think? she meekly looked to Heaven to avert all ill.

Mary Acton also was less elated and more alarmed than she cared to confess:  not that she, any more than Grace, knew or thought about lords of manors, or physical troubles on the score of finding the crock:  but Mrs. Quarles’s shawl, and sundry fearful fancies tinged with blood, these worried her exceedingly, and made her look upon the gold with an uneasy feeling, as if it were an unclean thing, a sort of Achan’s wedge.

At last, here comes Roger back, somewhat unsteadily I fear, with a stone two-gallon jar of what he was pleased to avouch to be “the down-right stingo.”  “Hooray, Poll!” (he had not ceased shouting all the way from Bacchus’s,) “Hooray—­here I be again, a gentle-folk, a lord, a king, Poll:  why daughter Grace, what’s come to you?  I won’t have no dull looks about to-day, girl.  Isn’t this enough to make a poor man merry?  No more troubles, no more toil, no more ‘humble sarvent,’ no more a ragged, plodding ploughman:  but a lord, daughter Grace—­a great, rich, luxurious lord—­isn’t this enough to make a man sing out hooray?—­Thank the crock of gold for this—­Oh, blessed crock!”

“Hush, father, hush! that gold will be no blessing to you; Heaven send it do not bring a curse.  It will be a sore temptation, even if the rights of it are not in some one else:  we know not whom it may belong to, but at any rate it cannot well be ours.”

“Not ours, child? whose in life is it then?”

Mary Acton, made quite meek by a superstitious dread of having money of the murdered, stepped in to Grace’s help, whom her father’s fierce manner had appalled, with “Roger, it belonged to Mrs. Quarles, I’m morally sure on it—­and must now be Simon Jennings’s, her heir.”