“What, then?” cried Susan, coloring scarlet, “it is not his life you care for, it is his means of being useful to us!  Poor Mr. Meadows!  He has no friend but me.  I will give you a line to him.”  The line contained these words:  “Forgive me.”

Half an hour after receipt of it Meadows was at the farm.  Susan was going to make some faint apology.  He stopped her and said:  “I know you like to make folk happy.  I have got a job for you.  A gentleman, a friend of mine in Cheshire, wants a bailiff.  He has written to me.  A word from me will do the business.  Now is there any one you would like to oblige?  The place is worth five hundred a year.”  Susan was grateful to him for waiving disagreeable topics.  She reflected and said:  “Ah! but he is no friend of yours.”

“What does that matter if he is yours?”

“Will Fielding.”

“With all my heart.  Only my name must not be mentioned.  You are right.  He can marry on this.  They would both have starved in ‘The Grove.’”

Thus he made the benevolent girl taste the sweets of power.  “You will be asked to do many a kind action like this when you are Mrs. Meadows.”  So he bribed father and daughter each after their kind.

The offer came in form from the gentleman to Will Fielding.  He and Miss Holiday had already been cried in church.  They were married, and went off to Cheshire.

So Meadows got rid of Will Fielding at a crisis.  When it suited his strategy he made his enemy’s fortune with as little compunction as he would have ruined him.  A man of iron!  Cold iron, hot iron, whatever iron was wanted.

Mr. and Mrs. Fielding gone off to Cheshire, and Mrs. Holiday after them on a visit of domestic instruction, Meadows publicly announced his approaching marriage with Miss Merton.  The coast being clear, he clinched the last nail.  From this day there were gusts of repugnance, but not a shadow of resistance on Susan’s side.  It was to be.

The weather was fine, and every evening this man and woman walked together.  The woman envied by all the women; the man by all the men.  Yet they walked side by side like the ghosts of lovers.  And, since he was her betrothed, one or two iron-gray hairs in the man’s head had turned white, and lines deepened in his face.  The victim had unwittingly revenged herself.

He had stabbed her heart again and again, and drained it.  He had battered this poor heart till it had become more like leather than flesh and blood, and now he wanted to nestle in it and be warmed by it.  To kill the affections and revive them at will.  No!!!!

She tried to give happiness and to avoid giving pain, but her heart of hearts was inaccessible.  The town had capitulated, but the citadel was empty yet impregnable.  And there were moments when flashes of hate mingled with the steady flame of this unhappy man’s love, and he was tempted to kill her and himself.