a cord’er—­bootmaker, you call ’em—­looked down him, as he was stretched out on the shore of the sea, all along, and didn’t know him till he come to the boots, and he says, ‘It’s Abner;’ for there was his boots to know him by.  Now, will you deny, Mas’ Gammon, you said, Mr. Hackbut’s boots, and a long stride it was for ’em from London?  And I won’t be laughed at through arts of any sly old man!”

The circumstantial charge made no impression on Master Gammon, who was heard to mumble, as from the inmost recesses of tight-packed dumpling; but he left the vindication of his case to the farmer’s laughter.  The mention of her uncle had started a growing agitation in Rhoda, to whom the indication of his eccentric behaviour was a stronger confirmation of his visit to the neighbourhood.  And wherefore had he journeyed down?  Had he come to haunt her on account of the money he had poured into her lap?  Rhoda knew in a moment that she was near a great trial of her strength and truth.  She had more than once, I cannot tell you how distantly, conceived that the money had been money upon which the mildest word for “stolen” should be put to express the feeling she had got about it, after she had parted with the bulk of it to the man Sedgett.  Not “stolen,” not “appropriated,” but money that had perhaps been entrusted, and of which Anthony had forgotten the rightful ownership.  This idea of hers had burned with no intolerable fire; but, under a weight of all discountenancing appearances, feeble though it was, it had distressed her.  The dealing with money, and the necessity for it, had given Rhoda a better comprehension of its nature and value.  She had taught herself to think that her suspicion sprang from her uncle’s wild demeanour, and the scene of the gold pieces scattered on the floor, as if a heart had burst at her feet.

No sooner did she hear that Anthony had been, by supposition, seen, than the little light of secret dread flamed a panic through her veins.  She left the table before Master Gammon had finished, and went out of the house to look about for her uncle.  He was nowhere in the fields, nor in the graveyard.  She walked over the neighbourhood desolately, until her quickened apprehension was extinguished, and she returned home relieved, thinking it folly to have imagined her uncle was other than a man of hoarded wealth, and that he was here.  But, in the interval, she had experienced emotions which warned her of a struggle to come.  Who would be friendly to her, and an arm of might?  The thought of the storm she had sown upon all sides made her tremble foolishly.  When she placed her hand in Robert’s, she gave his fingers a confiding pressure, and all but dropped her head upon his bosom, so sick she was with weakness.  It would have been a deceit toward him, and that restrained her; perhaps, yet more, she was restrained by the gloomy prospect of having to reply to any words of love, without an idea of what to say, and with a loathing of caresses.  She saw herself condemned to stand alone, and at a season when she was not strengthened by pure self-support.