“What’s the matter, Daniel?  Anything wrong?” Samuel asked, feeling boyish as he usually did in the presence of Daniel.

The well-favoured white-haired man seized him with one hand by the shoulder in a grip that convicted Samuel of frailty.

“Look here, Sam’l,” said he in his low, pleasant voice, somewhat altered by excitement.  “You know as my wife drinks?”

He stared defiantly at Samuel.

“N—­no,” said Samuel.  “That is—­no one’s ever said—–­”

This was true.  He did not know that Mrs. Daniel Povey, at the age of fifty, had definitely taken to drink.  There had been rumours that she enjoyed a glass with too much gusto; but ‘drinks’ meant more than that.

“She drinks,” Daniel Povey continued.  “And has done this last two year!”

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” said Samuel, tremendously shocked by this brutal rending of the cloak of decency.

Always, everybody had feigned to Daniel, and Daniel had feigned to everybody, that his wife was as other wives.  And now the man himself had torn to pieces in a moment the veil of thirty years’ weaving.

“And if that was the worst!” Daniel murmured reflectively, loosening his grip.

Samuel was excessively disturbed.  His cousin was hinting at matters which he himself, at any rate, had never hinted at even to Constance, so abhorrent were they; matters unutterable, which hung like clouds in the social atmosphere of the town, and of which at rare intervals one conveyed one’s cognizance, not by words, but by something scarce perceptible in a glance, an accent.  Not often is a town such as Bursley starred with such a woman as Mrs. Daniel Povey.

“But what’s wrong?” Samuel asked, trying to be firm.

And, “What is wrong?” he asked himself.  “What does all this mean, at after one o’clock in the morning?”

“Look here, Sam’l,” Daniel recommenced, seizing his shoulder again.  “I went to Liverpool corn market to-day, and missed the last train, so I came by mail from Crewe.  And what do I find?  I find Dick sitting on the stairs in the dark pretty high naked.”

“Sitting on the stairs?  Dick?”

“Ay!  This is what I come home to!”

“But—­”

“Hold on!  He’s been in bed a couple of days with a feverish cold, caught through lying in damp sheets as his mother had forgot to air.  She brings him no supper to-night.  He calls out.  No answer.  Then he gets up to go down-stairs and see what’s happened, and he slips on th’ stairs and breaks his knee, or puts it out or summat.  Sat there hours, seemingly!  Couldn’t walk neither up nor down.”

“And was your—­wife—­was Mrs.-?”

“Dead drunk in the parlour, Sam’l.”

“But the servant?”

“Servant!” Daniel Povey laughed.  “We can’t keep our servants.  They won’t stay.  You know that.”

He did.  Mrs. Daniel Povey’s domestic methods and idiosyncrasies could at any rate be freely discussed, and they were.