“Dang it!” he cried in loud but not unfriendly surprise, “you are not so afeard as that of the footpads? Why, none of them has been heard on for weeks in these parts. And if they did turn up, I lay it, they would not be the rogues to put hands on a cart with sticks of furniture, and the loike of a parson’s wife, with a husswife, and a groat or two in her pocket, i’stead o’ king’s gold. My Liz wouldn’t be so bad at the ghosteses; but mappen it is the night air gotten into your bones—you beant cold now, be you? There ought to be a bed-cover here-a-ways.” Lady Bell took heart again, and observed to herself that if he roared to his horses, he did not strike them; and he spoke gently of his Liz, though poor little Lady Bell had not much experience of the home charities which soften a man, be he fine gentleman or clown. But she was capable of distinguishing that her companion pulled out the woollen bed-cover, and wrapped it round her feet with good will. After that, the stars shone out in the sky; and she could read this in them, with her childish, ignorant eyes, so much accustomed to look at artificial ceilings, whether painted in fresco, or moulded in stucco, or left simple oaken beams—so little used to look at the blue vault of heaven, what Daniel read on the walls of a Babylonish palace, the handwriting of a divine presence, the same which still finds the mighty monarch wanting, and watches over the desolate and oppressed. Back at Peasmarsh, Squire Trevor had been engaged in a deeper carouse than usual; had been carried home dead drunk to his lodgings, and had slept off the fumes which had mounted to his brain, before he learnt the absence of Lady Bell. In the meantime, the partially informed landlady had been quite unconcerned since she had learnt by Lady Bell Trevor’s own hand that she had gone to a friend’s where she might stay late. The landlady was not surprised that the young madam had stretched her tether and lain at her friend’s; nay, was she not better out of the way, the worthy woman calculated, though she herself was not at all sensitive with regard to the state in which her lodgers were brought home to her house. Moreover, she had known many a madam not much older than Lady Bell, make no bones about it, but take it as a matter of course, that their gentlemen should be lifted out of their chairs like so many logs on their return from the tavern, and not be fit to bite a finger when they were set down. But the woman was thrown into the utmost dismay by the effect of her words, and by the changeful gusts of passion, each more terrible than another, which her announcement roused in Mr. Trevor. Lady Bell had no friend in Peasmarsh, or out of it. She had played him false. She should rue it to the last day of her life. He should never let her put a foot within his doors again.