’Leave my house, young man; it’s an honest house and a clean, and no fit place for a sinful swine.  Get out,’ he says, ’"For without are dogs—­“’

With that he went on with a long text of Revelation that I won’t repeat to you, sir, for I know your ears are nice, and it’s out of one of the plainest-spoken parts of the Bible.  Edgar turned as white as a sheet.

‘I swear to God,’ he said, ’I wasn’t to blame.  I know what you have heard, but if I can’t whiten myself without blacking a woman

I’ll live and die as black as hell,’ he says.  ’But I don’t need whitening with those that love me,’ he says, looking at Lilian and then at me—­oh! yes, he looked at me then.

I said, ‘No, indeed,’ and so did Lilian; but she began to cry, and before we had time to think what it was all about, he had taken his hat and kissed Lilian and was gone.  But he turned back at the door again.

‘I’ll write to you,’ he says to Lilian, ’but I don’t cross this door again till those words are unsaid,’ and so he was gone.

Him being gone, uncle told us what he had heard in Lewes, and what all folks there believed to be the truth; how young Edgar had carried on, as men may not, with a young married woman, the grocer’s wife where he lodged, the end of it being that she drowned herself in a pond near by, leaving as her last word that he was the cause of it; and so he may have been, but not the way my uncle and the folk at Lewes thought, I’ll stake my soul.  God makes His troubles in dozens; He don’t make a new patterned one for every back.  I wasn’t the only woman who ever loved Edgar Linley without encouragement and without hope, and risked her soul because she was mad with loving him.

But when uncle had told us all this with a black look on his face I never had seen before, he said—­

’Girls, I have always been a clean liver, and I have brought you up in the fear of the Lord.  I don’t want to judge any man, and Lilian is of age and her own mistress.  It’s not for me to say what she shall or shan’t do, but if she marries that scoundrel, she has my curse here and hereafter, and not one penny of my money, if it was to save her from the workhouse.’

After that we were sad enough at Whitecroft.  But in two days come a letter from Edgar to Lilian; and when she had read it, she looked at me and said, ’O Isabel, whatever shall I do?  I never can marry without dear uncle’s consent,’ and I turned and went from her without a word, because I couldn’t bear to see her arguing and considering what to do, when the best thing in the world was to her hand for the taking.

All the next week she cried all day and most of the night.  Then uncle went to London, my belief being it was to alter his will, so that if Lilian married Edgar, she should feel it in her pocket, anyhow, and he was to stay all night, and the farm servants slept out of the house, and we were without a maid at the time.  So Lilian and me were left alone at Whitecroft.