old, and the lonesomeness of a man without chick or child. He would have felt unutterably forlorn and miserable, he would have shrunk trembling from the shapes of death and pain that seemed to fill the darkness, but for this fact, this defence, this treasure, that set him apart from his fellows and gave him this proud sense of superiority, of a good time coming in spite of all. Instinctively, as he sat on the bed, he pushed his bare foot backwards till his heel touched a wooden object that stood underneath. The contact cheered him at once. He ceased to think about Eliza, his head was once more full of whirling plans and schemes.

The wooden object was a box that held his money, the savings of a labourer's lifetime. Seventy-one pounds! It seemed to him an ocean of gold, never to be exhausted. The long toil of saving it was almost done. After the Frampton job, he would begin enjoying it, cautiously at first, taking a bit of work now and again, and then a bit of holiday.

All the savour of life was connected for him with that box. His mind ran over the constant excitements of the many small loans he had made from it to his relations and friends. A shilling in the pound interest—he had never taken less and he had never asked more. He had only lent to people he knew well, people in the village whom he could look after, and seldom for a term longer than three months, for to be parted from his money at all gave him physical pain. He had once suffered great anxiety over a loan to his eldest brother of thirty pounds. But in the end James had paid it all back. He could still feel tingling through him the passionate joy with which he had counted out the recovered sovereigns, with the extra three half-sovereigns of interest.

Muster Drew indeed! John fell into an angry inward argument against his suggestion of the savings bank. It was an argument he had often rehearsed, often declaimed, and at bottom it all came to this—without that box under his bed, his life would have sunk to dulness and decrepitude; he would have been merely a pitiful and lonely old man. He had neither wife nor children, all for the hoard's sake; but while the hoard was there, to be handled any hour, he regretted nothing. Besides, there was the peasant's rooted distrust of offices, and paper transactions, of any routine that checks his free will and frightens his inexperience. He was still eagerly thinking when the light began to flood into his room, and before he could compose himself to sleep the women called him.

But he shed no more tears. He saw Eliza die, his companion of forty years, and hardly felt it. What troubled him all through the last scene was the thought that now he should never know why she was so set against "Bessie's 'avin' it."

SCENE II

It was, indeed, the general opinion in Clinton Magna that John Bolderfield—or "Borrofull," as the village pronounced it, took his sister-in-law's death too lightly. The women especially pronounced him a hard heart. Here was "poor Eliza" gone, Eliza who had kept him decent and comfortable for forty years, ever since he was a lad, and he could go about whistling, and—to talk to him—as gay as a lark! Yet John contributed handsomely to the burial expenses—Eliza having already, through her burial club, provided herself with a more than regulation interment; and he gave Jim's Louisa her mourning. Nevertheless, these things did not avail. It was felt instinctively that he was not beaten down as he ought to have been, and Mrs. Saunders, the smith's wife, was applauded when she said to her neighbours that "you couldn't expeck a man with John Bolderfield's money to have as many feelin's as other people." Whence it would seem that the capitalist is no more truly popular in small societies than in large.

John, however, did not trouble himself about these things. He was hard at work harvesting for Muster Hill's widow, and puzzling his head day and night as to what to do with his box.

When the last field had been carried and the harvest supper was over, he came home late, and wearied out. His working life at Clinton Magna was done; and the family he had worked for so long was broken up in distress and poverty. Yet he felt only a secret exultation. Such toil and effort behind—such a dreamland in front!

Next day he set to work to wind up his affairs. The furniture of the cottage was left to Eliza's son Jim, and the daughter had arranged for the carting of it to the house twelve miles off where her parents lived. She was to go with it on the morrow, and John would give up the cottage and walk over to Frampton, where he had already secured a lodging.

Only twenty-four hours!—and he had not yet decided. Which was it to be—Saunders, after all—or the savings bank—or Bessie?

He was cording up his various possessions—a medley lot—in different parcels and bundles when Bessie Costrell knocked at the door. She had already offered to stow away anything he might like to leave with her.

"Well, I thought you'd be busy," she said as she walked in, "an' I came up to lend a hand. Is them the things you're goin' to leave me to take care on?"

John nodded.

"Field's cart, as takes Louisa's things to-morrer, is a-goin' to deliver these at your place first. They're more nor I thought they would be. But you can put 'em anywheres."

"Oh, I'll see to them."

She sat down and watched him tie the knots of the last parcel.

"There's some people as is real ill-natured," she said presently, in an angry voice.

"Aye?" said John, looking up sharply. "What are they sayin' now?"

"It's Muster Saunders. 'Ee's allus sayin' nassty things about other folks. And there'd be plenty of fault to be found with 'im, if onybody was to try. An' Sally Saunders eggs him on dreadful."

Saunders was the village smith, a tall, brawny man, of great size and corresponding wisdom, who had been the village arbiter and general councillor for a generation. There was not a will made in Clinton Magna that he did not advise upon; not a bit of contentious business that he had not a share in; not a family history that he did not know. His probity was undisputed; his ability was regarded with awe; but as he had a sharp tongue and was no respecter of persons, there was of course an opposition.

John took a seat on the wooden box he had just been cording, and mopped his brow. His full cheeks were crimson, partly with exertion, partly with sudden annoyance.

"What's 'ee been sayin' now? Though it doan't matter a brass farthin' to me what 'ee says."

"He says you 'aven't got no proper feelin's about poor Eliza, an' you'd ought to have done a great deal more for Louisa. But 'ee says you allus were a mean one with your money—an' you knew that 'ee knew it—for 'ee'd stopped you takin' an unfair advantage more nor once. An' 'ee didn't believe as your money would come to any good; for now Eliza was gone you wouldn't know how to take care on it."

John's eyes flamed.

"Oh! 'ee says that, do 'ee? Well, Saunders wor allus a beast—an' a beast 'ee'll be."

He sat with his chin on his large dirty hands, ruminating furiously.

It was quite true that Saunders had thwarted him more than once. There was old Mrs. Moulsey at the shop, when she wanted to buy those cottages in Potter's Row—and there was Sam Field the higgler—both of them would have borrowed from him if Saunders hadn't cooled them off. Saunders said it was a Jew's interest he was asking—because there was security—but he wasn't going to accept a farthing less than his shilling a pound for three months—not