But under the trivialities there was tense excitement. Now and again a man who had been slow to take the alarm forced his way, pale and agitated, through the crowd, to vanish within the doors; or a countryman, whom the news had only just reached in his boosey-close or his rickyard—as they call a stackyard in Aldshire—rode up the hill, hot with haste and cursing those who blocked his road, flung his reins to the nearest bystander, and plunged into the bank as into water. And on the fringe, hiding themselves in doorways, or in the dark mouths of alleys, were men who stood biting their nails, heedless or unconscious of what passed about them; or who came staggering up from the Gullet with stammering tongues and eyes bloodshot with drink—men who a year before had been well-to-do, sober citizens, fathers of families. All one to them now whether Ovington’s stood or fell! They had lost their all, and to show for it and for all that they had ever been worth had but a few pieces of printed paper, certificates, or what not, which they took out and read in corners, as if something of hope might still, at the thousandth time of reading be derived from them, or which they brandished aloft in the tavern with boasts of what they would have gained if trickery had not robbed them. So, though the crowd had its humors and was swept at times by gusts of laughter, the spectre of ruin stood, gaunt and bleak, in the background, and many a heart quailed before grim visions of bailiffs and forced sales and the workhouse—the workhouse, that in Aldersbury, where they were nothing if not genteel, they called the House of Industry. And Ovington, as he sat over his books, or peered from time to time from a window, knew this, and felt it. He would not have been human if he had not thought with longing of that twelve thousand, the use of which had so nearly been his; ay, and with passing regret—for after all was not the greatest good for the greatest number sound morality?—of the self-denying ordinance which had robbed him of it. But harassed and heavy-hearted as he was, he remained master of himself, and his bearing was calm and dignified, when at a quarter to four, he showed himself, for the first time that day, in the bank. It was still half-full, and the approach of closing time and the certainty that they could not all be paid that day, along with the fear that the doors would not open on the morrow, mightily inflamed those who were not in the front rank. They clamored to be paid, brandishing their books or their notes. Some tried prayers, addressing Rodd by name, pleading their poverty or their services. Others reproached him for his slowness, and swore that it was purposeful. And they would not be still, they pushed and elbowed one another, rose on tiptoe and shuffled their feet, quarrelled among themselves.