Chapter 55 - Page 2

of harm, perhaps, if any thing was found, by breaking forth about it.

Mrs. Hockin had not the least idea of the danger we had encountered. Bailiff Hopkins had sent her home in Rasper's fly by an inland road, and she kept a good scolding quite ready for her husband, to distract his mind from disaster. That trouble had happened she could not look out of her window without knowing; but could it be right, at their time of life, to stand in the wet so, and challenge Providence, and spoil the first turkey-poult of the season?

But when she heard of her husband's peril, in the midst of all his losses, his self-command, and noble impulse first of all to rescue life, she burst into tears, and hugged and kissed me, and said the same thing nearly fifty times.

"Just like him. Just like my Nicholas. You thought him a speculative, selfish man. Now you see your mistake, Erema."

When her veteran husband came home at last (thoroughly jaded, and bringing his fishermen to gulp the pea soup and to gollop the turkey), a small share of mind, but a large one of heart, is required to imagine her doings. Enough that the Major kept saying, "Pooh-pooh!" and the more he said, the less he got of it.

When feelings calmed down, and we returned to facts, our host and hero (who, in plain truth, had not so wholly eclipsed me in courage, though of course I expected no praise, and got none, for people hate courage in a lady), to put it more simply, the Major himself, making a considerable fuss, as usual--for to my mind he never could be Uncle Sam--produced from the case of his little "Church Service," to which he had stuck like a Briton, a sealed and stamped letter, addressed to me at Castlewood, in Berkshire--"stamped," not with any post-office tool, but merely with the red thing which pays the English post.

Sodden and blurred as the writing was, I knew the clear, firm hand, the same which on the envelope at Shoxford had tempted me to meanness. This letter was from Thomas Hoyle; the Major had taken it from the pocket of his corpse; all doubt about his death was gone. When he felt his feet on the very shore, and turned to support his mother, a violent wave struck the back of his head upon Major Hockin's pillar-box.

Such sadness came into my heart--though sternly it should have been gladness--that I begged their pardon, and went away, as if with a private message. And wicked as it may have been, to read was more than once to cry. The letter began abruptly:

"You know nearly all my story now. I have only to tell you what brought me to you, and what my present offer is. But to make it clear, I must enlarge a little.

"There was no compact of any kind between your father and myself. He forbore at first to tell what he must have known, partly, perhaps, to secure my escape, and partly for other reasons. If he had been brought to trial, his duty