Mrs. Winnie caught him at this bobbing and scraping, with a puzzled stare in his eyes and his thick head full of kindness. He glanced at his wife with extreme cunning, and gave her a whisper behind his hands. “Come ye here, Winnie. What be t’ lady a-staring at? Here be I makin’ a knee to her—” “Get out with you, you great fool!” She gave him a cuff across the ear. But Mr. Jennifer still gazed at Barbara. “She be purty enough. But what be a-terrifying me—be—why she won’t blink them eyes o’ hers.” “Get along with you, Chris Jennifer, you great booby! Can’t you see she be dazed with t’ cold? And will she be thanking you for standing there and staring like a cow? Go and help the gentleman with his horse.” “And did them come all on one horse, my dear?” Mrs. Winnie looked at him, and Mr. Jennifer went. XL With the coming of winter there had been strange happenings at the Purcells’ house in Pall Mall, for my lady had died the night after Stephen Gore’s going, with no one to comfort her but Mrs. Jael. The servants had all fled, and the house stood deserted save for the live woman and the dead one; the very tradesmen shirked the steps; friends had business elsewhere; and Dr. Hemstruther himself, being a keen Protestant when popery was especially perilous, kept his distance, knowing that my Lord Gore’s influence had been paramount there in heart and body. For my Lord Gore was one of the Catholic gentlemen upon whom the Plot-men longed to lay their hands. It happened that when poor Anne Purcell died that there was some store of silver and of plate in the house, also her jewels and trinkets, and sundry precious things that belonged to the Purcell family. Mrs. Jael showed some little care for the corpse by covering it with a clean sheet, but she showed far more care for her own concerns and for the valuables that were at her mercy. She ransacked the whole house, gathering every small thing of value into a heap on the floor of one of the attics, gloating and smiling over it, and promising herself great joys. For Mrs. Jael had picked up a sweetheart, a rough, sturdy fellow from Aldgate way, and she crept out one night to warn him of her good-fortune, and to persuade him to help in spiriting away the plunder. The man was a common thief, and had tricked even the smooth, sly Jael for three months past, pretending that he was in the cloth trade, and that he hankered greatly after a comely widow. He was ready enough to join in the adventure, and cared as little for small-pox as for the reek of an open drain. And thus Mrs. Jael let him into the house by night, and they packed up the plunder between them in a couple of sacks, and so went their way into the darkness. But the man no longer had any desire for the voluptuous embraces of a widow, and in some way Mrs. Jael came to her end that night, and was found weeks later afloat in the Thames, an unrecognizable and nameless body.