“You’re a better man than I am, John; you make me see what I’ve done; you make me wish I was dead.” “Liar! Don’t prate no more to me. I hate the filthy sight of ’e, an’ the sound of thy oily tongue. I’d swing for ’e to-morrow, an’ keep my last breath to laugh with; but for she. Tell her—no, that I’ll do myself. I’ll tell her; an’ no call for you to fear as your fine name will get any hard knocks. I’ll never soil my mouth with it more arter to-day.” He departed, and the other, in misery and shame, stood and watched him return to the threshing-floor. Yet, as the unhappy spirit who has sacrificed his life to a drug and creeps through shame and contumely back and back to the poison, counting nothing as vital that does not separate him therefrom, so now the man felt that Sarah Belworthy was his own and told himself that his honour, his self-respect, his fair repute were well lost in exchange for this unexampled pearl. CHAPTER VI At nightfall John Aggett visited the cottage of the Belworthys, but Sarah was from home for the day and he had a few words with her mother instead. That astute woman was well informed of affairs, and the romance now proceeding had long been the salt of her life, though she pretended no knowledge of it. In common with her husband, she hoped for glory from a possible union between the cot of Belworthy and the homestead of the Chaves. But these ambitions were carefully hidden from sight. All the smith said, when the matter was whispered, amounted to a pious hope that the Lord would look after his own—meaning Sarah; but presently it behooved both parents to stir in the matter, when they learned of the subsequent meeting between their daughter and John Aggett. A very unexpected determination on the girl’s part resulted from that occasion, and the matter fell out in this way.