And so the remotest possibility of finding work on the farms drifted away from Abner. The few labourers who moved about the fields, the solitary teams at plough, seemed glued to the frozen surface of the land, stirring sadly as in a dream. In spite of the kindness of their neighbours, so delicately shown in the gifts of roots and bundles of wood that old Drew carried home on his bent shoulders, the family at Wolfpits felt the pinch of cold and want. Mary, true to her resolution, uttered no word of complaint, but her face told Abner what she was suffering so plainly that he could not bear to look at her. One night he left her and spent the evening with old Drew in his bedroom, drinking the labourer’s home-made poison till his brain was fuddled and his limbs, for the first time, were warm. Mary heard him stumbling up the stairs at night, but when they met next morning she did not reproach him. Her little store of money was nearly gone. One day, racking her brains for some new expedient to stave off the inevitable end, she remembered Mrs Malpas’s visit and the story of the fifty pounds which George had stolen from the Buffalo on the eve of his imprisonment. She wondered, desperately, if the old woman was right, and he had hidden it in some corner of the house. She began to search, with the fierce enthusiasm of a seeker after treasure. She spent all her energy in turning the bedroom and kitchen inside out; she looked into the chimneys, for she had heard that money was sometimes hidden in such places. By the end of the day she was utterly exhausted but had found nothing. ‘At any rate,’ she thought, ‘the place looks tidier.’ A poor consolation!