“Meaning money?” he said, with a suppressed roar of a laugh. “No, I won’t take no money. I might say something nasty to you after that, but I won’t neither. It ain’t very nice for you, poor girl, to have your man brought home in that state by your old sweetheart. I feel for you; but you always had a sharp tongue, and you never would give in. I advise you to take more care of the Softy now you’ve got him back,” he said as he went away. Patty shut and locked the door with an energy of rage and humiliation which almost overcame the horror of being heard. And then she went into the library and sat beside her husband till he had sufficiently recovered from his stupor to be taken upstairs. What hours of vigil! All the sins of her triumph might have been expiated while she sat there and shivered through the miserable night. CHAPTER XXXVI. Patty had thoughts enough, surely, to occupy her that night, but it is doubtful whether there were any that came into her mind with the same reality--repeated again and again, as if by accident the recollection had been blown back upon her by a sudden wind--as those careless words uttered by Pearson when he had described how he had found Gervase: “I had been at a little hop at Coulter’s Mill;” he said ’op, but though Patty had never used that manner of speech herself it did not hurt her. A little hop at Coulter’s Mill. Such things were going on while she was shut up in the dismal grandeur of Greyshott. Girls were whirling round with their partners, receiving their attentions, which, though they might be rough and not very refined, were all that Patty knew of those delights of youth; while she, Patty, whom they all envied, who was now so far above them, sat and played backgammon with an old dotard, or watched half the night for her Softy’s return. There were still such things, and Roger Pearson went to them! Patty had a soft place in her heart for Roger; she wished him no harm, and it might very well have been, had not Gervase and ambition come across her path, that she should have been his wife; and though she wished him nothing but good, Patty did hope that she had more or less broken his heart. She thought he would never have wished to go to those sort of places again, where every tune that was played and every dance would remind him of her. His careless speech took her, therefore, full in the breast, with a stupefying surprise. And he did not say it as if it was anything wonderful, but only as the calm ordinary of life, “I’d been at a little ’op at Coulter’s Mill.” And he was returning about two o’clock in the morning, which showed that he had amused himself well. Could such things be, and she out of them all? Every time this thought crossed her mind it gave her a new shock. It seemed almost impossible that such things could be.