“I told you I had no money.  You’ll drive me from this house by bringing disgrace upon it.”

“That’s very good,” Mr. Charles said, with a cruel laugh.  “That’s a capital joke.”

Jane entered with coffee.  “That’s right,” she whispered, encouragingly to Mr. Charles; “laugh and be cheerful, Mr. Charles, and make haste with your coffee.”

The face of Mr. Charles blackened to night.  He turned like a tiger upon the servant.  “Laugh and be cheerful?” he roared; and then he raised a hoarse mock laugh, that moved Mrs. Rowe, in her agony of fear, to turn the key in the lock of her desk.

Shaking her hands wildly in the air, Jane left the room, and shut the door.

“You are an arrant coward, Charles,” Mrs. Rowe hissed, leaning across the table and shaking her head violently.

Mr. Charles imitated her gesture, answering—­“I am what heartless people have made me.  I have been dragged up under a cloud; made the scape-goat.  How often in the course of your hypocritical days have you wished me dead?  You hear I’ve a cough; but I cannot promise you it’s a churchyard one.  I’m a nuisance; but I suppose I’m not responsible for my existence, Mrs. Rowe. I was not consulted.”

“Viper!”

“And devil too, when needful:  remember that.”  Mr. Charles moved round the table in the direction of the desk.

“Stand where you are.  I would rather give you the clothes from my back than touch you.”  Mrs. Rowe, as she stood still turning the lock of the bureau, and keeping her angry eyes fixed upon the man, was the picture of all the hate she expressed.

She never took her eyes off him, nor did he quail, while she fumbled in the drawer in which she kept money.  The musical rattle of the gold smote upon the ear of Mr. Charles.

“Pretty sound,” he said, with a smile of hate in his face; “but there is crisp paper sounds sweeter.  Mrs. Rowe, I’m not here for a couple of yellow-boys.  Do you hear that?” He banged the table, and advanced a step.

“You can’t bleed a stone, miscreant.”

“Nay, but you can break it, Mrs. Rowe.  I mean business to-day.  The rarer I make my visits the better for both of us.”

“I am quite of that opinion.”

“Then make it as long as you like; you know how.”

“Is this ever to end?  Have you no shame?  Charles, you will end with some tragedy.  A man who can play the part you are playing, must be ready for crime!”

Mr. Charles shook his head in impatient rage, and made another step towards Mrs. Rowe.

“Move nearer, and I wake the house, come what may.”  Mrs. Rowe’s face looked like one cut in grey stone.

“What! and wake the Dean and his lady!  What! affright the Reverend Horace Mohun who counts Mrs. Rowe among the milk-white sheep of his flock!  No; Mrs. Rowe is too prudent a woman—­Now.”  As he ended, she drew forth a roll of notes.  He made a clutch at them—­and she started back.