"We’d a few words together in t’caif," she answered tranquilly, "and wi’ a few folks looking on an’ all. She was setting it round we were broke, and had gitten the sack, and a deal more; but I reckon I give her summat to bite on afore I was through.... Seems as if you an’ me had been having a sort o’ side-show," she finished, with a grim smile. "Ay, well, we’ve given Witham summat to crack about, if we’ve never done nowt else...." Their minds had been full of Eliza as they drove to market, and now they were busy turning her over in their minds again. Sarah’s account of her splendid effort cheered and uplifted them for a while, but they knew only too well that their sense of superiority would not last. Even their victories, ever so dearly bought, turned to Eliza’s advantage in the end. Life was on the side of Eliza, for whom all things were certain to work out well. Heaven was on the side of Eliza, whose face had never registered a single memory of pain. The Simon Thornthwaites never got over the feeling that somehow she had played them false, had wheedled by undue influence the balance of justice off the straight. Alone, they were able to see some dignity in their tragic lives, but once with Eliza they were suddenly cheap,--mere poor relations fawning at her skirts. They saw themselves framed as such in her mocking eyes, and felt for the moment the shameful thing they seemed. She mocked them,--that was the evil thing she did; that petty, insidious crime which human nature finds so difficult to forgive. Mockery by comparison was her method, and one which was almost impossible to fight. In all that Eliza said and did, by her attitude and her dress, she invited the world to mark the incredible gulf that yawned between the Simon Thornthwaites and the Wills. She had made her opening point on the double wedding-day, though the actual cause of the enmity lay further back than that. Eliza, indeed, had intended to marry Simon and not Will,--Simon, the elder, the better-looking, and even the smarter in those far-off days. But in this, at least, Sarah had won the fall, and Eliza had never recovered from her surprise. From that moment the spoilt beauty had seen in the other’s plain person an opponent worthy of her steel, an antagonist whom it would take her all her life to down. Sneer and strike as she might, she could never be quite sure that she had finally got home, and in mingled inquisitiveness and wrath she sneered and struck again. There must be an end sometime to this spirit that would not break, but even after forty years there was little sign. Something deathless in Sarah rose up again after every stroke, and was always left standing erect when her world was in the dust.