‘Good woman!’ retorted the hag, ‘Money now? I—I that have been cursed! ’tis all too late, proud gentleman—the deed is done, the curse be now on you.’ Saying which, she huddled her ragged red cloak about her shoulders, and hurried from his sight, into the deep and dreary recesses of St. Giles’s. Harding experienced, as she vanished from his eye, a most extraordinary sensation: he felt grieved that he had spoken so harshly to the poor creature, and returned his shillings to his pocket with regret. Of course, fear of the fulfilment of her predictions did not mingle with any of his feelings on the occasion; and he proceeded to his office in Somerset-place, and performed all the arduous official duties of reading the opposition newspapers, discussing the leading politics of the day with the head of another department, and signing his name three times, before four o’clock. Martha the gipsy, however, although he had ‘poophoohed’ her out of his memory, would ever and anon flash across his mind; her figure was indelibly stamped upon his recollection; and though, of course, as I before said, a man of his firmness and intellect could care nothing, one way or another, for the maledictions of an ignorant, illiterate gipsy, still his feelings—whence arising I know not—prompted him to call a hackney-coach, and proceed _en voiture_ to his house rather than run the risk of again encountering the metropolitan sibyl, under whose forcible denunciation he was actually labouring. There is a period in each day of the lives of married people, at which, I am given to understand, a more than ordinarily unreserved communication of facts and feelings takes place; when all the world is shut out, and the two beings, who are in truth ‘but only one,’ commune together freely and fully upon the occurrences of the past day. At this period, the else sacred secrets of the drawing-room coterie, and the _tellable_ jokes of the after-dinner convivialist, are mutually interchanged by the fond pair, who, by the barbarous customs of uncivilized Britain, have been separated during part of the preceding evening. Then it is, that the husband informs his anxious consort how he has forwarded his worldly views with such a man—how he has carried his point in such a quarter—what he thinks of the talents of one, of the character of another; while the communicative wife gives _her_ views of the same subjects, founded upon what she has gathered from the individuals composing the female cabinet, and explains why she thinks he must have been deceived upon this point, or misled upon that. And thus, in recounting, in arguing, in discussing, and descanting, the blended interests of the happy pair are strengthened, their best hopes nourished, and perhaps eventually realized.