Probably of all those—and they were many—who travelled that day with their faces set towards the bank, they were the last to start. If Tuesday had been the town’s day, this was certainly the country’s day. For one thing, there was a market; for another, the news of something amiss, of something that threatened the little hoard of each—the slowly-garnered deposit or the hardly-won note—had journeyed by this time far and wide. It had reached alike the remote flannel-mill lapped in the folds of the border-hills, and the secluded hamlet buried amid orchards, and traceable on the landscape only by the grey tower of its church. On foot and on horse-back, riding and tying, in gigs and ass-carts, in market vans and carriers’ carts, the countryside came in—all who had anything to lose, and many who had nothing at stake, but were moved by a vague alarm. Even before daybreak the roads had begun to echo the sound of their marching. They came by the East Bridge, laboring up the steep, winding Cop; by the West Bridge and under the gabled fronts of Maerdol, along the river bank, before the house of the old sea-dog whose name was a household word, and whose portrait hung behind the mayor’s chair, and so up the Foregate—from every quarter they came. Before ten the streets were teeming with country-folk, whose fears were not allayed by the news that all through the previous day the townsfolk had been drawing their money. Sullen tradesmen, victims of the general depression, eyed the march from their shop doors, and some, fearing trouble, put up half their shutters. More took a malicious amusement in telling the rustics that they were too late, and that the bank would not open. The alarm was heightened by a chance word which had fallen from Frederick Welsh. The lawyer’s last thought had been to do harm, for his interest in common with all substantial men lay the other way. But that morning, before he had dressed, or so much as shaved, his office and even his dining-room had been invaded. Scared clients had overwhelmed him with questions—some that he could answer and more that he could not. He could tell them the law as to their securities, whether they were lodged for safety, or pawned for loans, or mortgaged on general account. But he could not tell them whether Ovington was solvent, or whether the bank would open, or whether Dean’s was affected; and it was for answers to these questions that they clamored. In the end, badgered out of all patience, he had delivered a curt lecture on banking.