Mrs. Marks had steadily kept her promise, silently and secretly working with a will to seek out Hodge's son. Like most energetic women, a first failure did not daunt or dispirit her, it only roused her energies the more vigorously. She was not to be defeated. The more difficult of accomplishment the more determined was she, and in the end successful. She dodged Hodge's "wide-awake" friend, and found Tom; nay more, she spoke with him, tried to reclaim him; but there she failed--she was not the sort of woman to win him over. A kind word might have done much, but that, Mrs. Mark's heart had not for such a reprobate as he. She told him the truth, the plain hard truth, heaping maledictions on his head unless he gave up his evil ways, forsook his godless companions, and returned home. She used no persuasion, no entreaty. Had she spoken to him kindly of his mother, perhaps his heart might have softened; but Mrs. Marks' voice came loud and strong, words followed one another fast and indignantly, so that ere she had well-nigh exhausted all the scorn she had, his mind was made up, and he obstinately refused to return home, simply because she desired, nay, commanded him to do so. What! become the laughing-stock of the whole of Deane? be known and marked in the village as the vile sinner she denounced him to be? He laughed at her threats and taunts, and left her, feeling perhaps more hardened than ever. Matthew was not far wrong when he tried to persuade himself the walking about in all weathers--so mysterious to him--had ruined his wife's health. A pouring steady rain was falling the day of her interview with Hodge's son, but true to her purpose, she had walked for miles along a heavy road, and across still damper fields to find him; then, flushed and heated with her passionate words and subsequent defeat, had started back again through the same rain, and reached home thoroughly wet through; then came a violent cold, and from that time her strength seemed to fail, although unacknowledged to herself, while her limbs lost their power, and pained her strangely; still she worked on, with the will to get well, but alas! the strength to do so was gone. She wrote to Mrs. Hodge advising her to have nothing further to do with such a good-for-nothing son, but forget him as fast as she could. Mrs. Marks' letter was not meant unkindly, but she never attempted to lessen Tom's fault or palliate his conduct; the truth stood out in all its glaring hideousness. Having no children herself, she knew nothing of a mother's strong, steadfast love. The knowledge that her son, her first-born, was with a gang of poachers who had wounded the Squire's visitor and killed one of the game watchers, threw dismay into the mother's heart and broke it. She died, begging her husband to still look for Tom, and reclaim him if possible--a promise her husband felt impossible of fulfilment, as he, like Mrs. Marks, thought badly of his son's heart.