The Story of Bessie Costrell

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 l