which brought him that very evening to offer her—­for the delicacy which made him understand that he must offer her privately—­every convenience for illness that his own wealth or his mother’s foresight had caused them to accumulate in their household, and which, as he learnt from Dr. Donaldson, Mrs. Hale might possibly require.  His presence, after the way he had spoken—­his bringing before her the doom, which she was vainly trying to persuade herself might yet be averted from her mother—­all conspired to set Margaret’s teeth on edge, as she looked at him, and listened to him.  What business had he to be the only person, except Dr. Donaldson and Dixon, admitted to the awful secret, which she held shut up in the most dark and sacred recess of her heart—­not daring to look at it, unless she invoked heavenly strength to bear the sight—­that, some day soon, she should cry aloud for her mother, and no answer would come out of the blank, dumb darkness?  Yet he knew all.  She saw it in his pitying eyes.  She heard it in his grave and tremulous voice.  How reconcile those eyes, that voice, with the hard-reasoning, dry, merciless way in which he laid down axioms of trade, and serenely followed them out to their full consequences?  The discord jarred upon her inexpressibly.  The more because of the gathering woe of which she heard from Bessy.  To be sure, Nicholas Higgins, the father, spoke differently.  He had been appointed a committee-man, and said that he knew secrets of which the exoteric knew nothing.  He said this more expressly and particularly, on the very day before Mrs. Thornton’s dinner-party, when Margaret, going in to speak to Bessy, found him arguing the point with Boucher, the neighbour of whom she had frequently heard mention, as by turns exciting Higgins’s compassion, as an unskilful workman with a large family depending upon him for support, and at other times enraging his more energetic and sanguine neighbour by his want of what the latter called spirit.  It was very evident that Higgins was in a passion when Margaret entered.  Boucher stood, with both hands on the rather high mantel-piece, swaying himself a little on the support which his arms, thus placed, gave him, and looking wildly into the fire, with a kind of despair that irritated Higgins, even while it went to his heart.  Bessy was rocking herself violently backwards and forwards, as was her wont (Margaret knew by this time) when she was agitated, Her sister Mary was tying on her bonnet (in great clumsy bows, as suited her great clumsy fingers), to go to her fustian-cutting, blubbering out loud the while, and evidently longing to be away from a scene that distressed her.  Margaret came in upon this scene.  She stood for a moment at the door—­then, her finger on her lips, she stole to a seat on the squab near Bessy.  Nicholas saw her come in, and greeted her with a gruff, but not unfriendly nod.  Mary hurried out of the house catching gladly at the open door, and crying aloud when she got away from her father’s presence.  It was only John Boucher that took no notice whatever who came in and who went out.