She gasped: ‘Sixpence,’ and took the money. Williams gave her a cheery good-night. He wondered at the way in which she had taken his scandal. ‘A proper hard old case, an’ no mistake!’ he thought. Mrs Malpas, forgetful of economy, left the light burning and went straight in to her husband. In moments of stress, even though she despised him and knew that he hardly understood her, she would use him as a dummy on which to vent her feelings. ‘Dad, dad!’ she cried. ‘That was Mr Williams of the Pentre.’ ‘Ay, mother . . . good land, good land! Williams. . . . Ay.’ ‘He has a tale of our George’s wife. She’s going on with that Fellows as lodges with them, the one that brought trouble on George. They was caught the two on them, at the Harley Arms, Redlake. You know . . .’ The old man, who was now awake, mumbled something about that being in the nature of things when a young woman was left too long to herself. She picked up the word furiously. ‘Nature!’ she cried. ‘It’s the nature of a brute beast, not the nature of a Christian woman! It’s the bad blood in her!’ He let her rave on in the dark. It was late, and now unlikely that any one else would call in at the bar. His head nodded, while she went on fuming, half to him and half to herself. She persuaded herself that her morality had been offended, though it was really the spiteful satisfaction of Williams rather than his news that had wounded her, for she could not think any worse of Abner and Mary than she did already. When the heat of her irritation against the farmer subsided, its place was taken by another and more subtle flame. She realised that she had found something to explain her former unreasonable hatred. Williams, in trying to shame her, had put a new weapon into her hands, one with which she might positively injure Abner and Mary together in George’s eyes. It had been the hardest part of her dealings with him at the time of the trial to see the way in which his loyalty to Mary, however little that might mean, returned. Now that her chance had come, George couldn’t keep up this sentimental pretence of a belief in Mary’s goodness any longer. Williams had justified her at last. She helped the old man up to bed, blew out his candle, and left him in the dark. Then she went downstairs, carried the lamp from the bar into the parlour, took out a sheet of lined paper, and a penholder carved out of olive wood from the garden of Gethsemane, and—began a letter to George. She wrote without haste, in the firm pointed characters that she had learnt as a young girl, carefully, methodically, with a perfect and cold precision. From first to last not the least quaver of indecision stayed her pen; but when she held the paper to the light to read what she had written, her hands trembled and the words ran like fire across her brain.