Hood had not returned when they sat down to tea.  Jessie began to ask questions about the strange-looking man they had met in company with him, but Mrs. Hood turned the conversation.

‘I suppose you’ll be coming with the same tale next, Jessie,’ she said, with reference to Geraldine.

’Me, Mrs. Hood?  No, indeed; I haven’t had lessons from Emily for nothing.  It’s all very well for empty-headed chits like Jerry here, but I’ve got serious things to attend to.  I’m like Emily, she and I are never going to be married.’

‘Emily never going to be married?’ exclaimed Mrs. Hood, half seriously.  ‘Ah, you mustn’t believe all Emily tells you.’

’Oh, she hasn’t told me that herself, but I’m quite sure she would be offended if any one thought her capable of such frivolity.’

‘Emily will keep it to herself till the wedding-day,’ said Geraldine, with a mocking shake of the bead.  ’She isn’t one to go telling her secrets.’

At this point Hood made his appearance.  His wife paid no heed to him as he entered; Emily glanced at him furtively.  He had the look of a man who has predetermined an attitude of easy good-humour, nor had the parting with Cheeseman failed to prove an occasion for fresh recourse to that fiery adjuvant which of a sudden was become indispensable to him.  Want of taste for liquor and lifelong habit of abstemiousness had hitherto kept Hood the soberest of men; he could not remember to have felt the warm solace of a draught taken for solace’ sake since the days when Cheeseman had been wont to insist upon the glass of gin at their meetings, and then it had never gone beyond the single glass, for he felt that his head was weak, and dreaded temptation.  Four-and-twenty hours had wrought such a change in him, that already to enter a public-house seemed a familiar act, and he calculated upon the courage to be begotten of a smoking tumbler.  Previously the mere outlay would have made him miserable, but the command of unearned coin was affecting him as it is wont to affect poor men.  The new aid given to Cheeseman left a few shillings out of the second broken sovereign.  Let the two pounds—­he said to himself—­be regarded as gone; eight remained untouched.  For the odd shillings, let them serve odd expenses.  So when he had purchased Cheeseman’s ticket to King’s Gross, he was free with small change at the station bar.  At the last moment it occurred to him that he might save himself a walk by going in the train as far as Pendal.  So it was here that the final parting had taken place.

He seated himself with his legs across a chair, and began to talk to Geraldine of the interesting news which Jessie had just whispered to him when they met on the road.  The character of his remarks was not quite what it would have been a day or two ago; he joked with more freedom than was his custom.  Studiously he avoided the eyes of his wife and daughter.  He declined to sit up to the table, but drank a cup of tea with his hands resting on the back of a chair.