The bygone time returned to her memory--the time when she had accepted Sir Jervis Redwood’s offer of employment, and when Mrs. Rook had arrived at the school to be her traveling companion to the North. The wretched creature had entirely forgotten her own loose talk, after she had drunk Miss Ladd’s good wine to the last drop in the bottle. As she was boasting now of her piety, so she had boasted then of her lost faith and hope, and had mockingly declared her free-thinking opinions to be the result of her ill-assorted marriage. Forgotten--all forgotten, in this later time of pain and fear. Prostrate under the dread of death, her innermost nature--stripped of the concealments of her later life--was revealed to view. The early religious training, at which she had scoffed in the insolence of health and strength, revealed its latent influence--intermitted, but a living influence always from first to last. Mrs. Rook was tenderly mindful of her exemplary parents, and proud of exhibiting religion, on the bed from which she was never to rise again. “Did I tell you that I am a miserable sinner?” she asked, after an interval of silence. Emily could endure it no longer. “Say that to the clergyman,” she answered--“not to me.” “Oh, but I must say it,” Mrs. Rook insisted. “I _am_ a miserable sinner. Let me give you an instance of it,” she continued, with a shameless relish of the memory of her own frailties. “I have been a drinker, in my time. Anything was welcome, when the fit was on me, as long as it got into my head. Like other persons in liquor, I sometimes talked of things that had better have been kept secret. We bore that in mind--my old man and I---when we were engaged by Sir Jervis. Miss Redwood wanted to put us in the next bedroom to hers--a risk not to be run. I might have talked of the murder at the inn; and she might have heard me. Please to remark a curious thing. Whatever else I might let out, when I was in my cups, not a word about the pocketbook ever dropped from me. You will ask how I know it. My dear, I should have heard of it from my husband, if I had let _that_ out--and he is as much in the dark as you are. Wonderful are the workings of the human mind, as the poet says; and drink drowns care, as the proverb says. But can drink deliver a person from fear by day, and fear by night? I believe, if I had dropped a word about the pocketbook, it would have sobered me in an instant. Have you any remark to make on this curious circumstance?” Thus far, Emily had allowed the woman to ramble on, in the hope of getting information which direct inquiry might fail to produce. It was impossible, however, to pass over the allusion to the pocketbook. After giving her time to recover from the exhaustion which her heavy breathing sufficiently revealed, Emily put the question: “Who did the pocketbook belong to?”