"Just what it don’t do, Charles; and the man that said it, saint or sinner, didn’t know what it was to love," answered the old prize-fighter. "If you love a female right down from the crown of her head to the tip of her toes, and through and through likewise, you fear for her something cruel. I was built so soft where that woman was concerned, that I hated for her to go for a drive in a trap, and couldn’t be easy--for thinking of the springs--till I seed her safe again. And when illness overtook her--why, ’fear’ wasn’t the name for it. I crawled about like a beaten dog and cringed to God A’mighty for her in season and out. But she had to go, and I had to be left. And she took twenty year of my life underground with her." They sympathised with him; then Mr. Snell returned to the main theme. "They’m quicker than us, however," he asserted. "I’m sure their brains work faster than what ours do. There’s many a thing a woman can’t make clear to a male mind, try as she will." Mr. Crocker laughed. "Yes," he admitted. "Such things as two and two make five--when they want ’em to make five. And they try and they try to make us see it; but we can’t. And yet they are always ready to believe that our two and two be five, God bless ’em!" "I wonder," said Mr. Snell. "’Tis so; but you must be masterful, Simon. You must make ’em feel you’re in earnest and have no shadow of doubt," said Billy Screech. "They love to see you strong, and they’d sooner see you wrong and sticking to it than be blowed from your purpose by another man. Nought on God’s earth be more hateful to a brave woman than to see her husband bested. And if a man bests you--whether ’tis at business or in any other way--don’t you tell her if you can help it. Love you as she will, you’ll drop in her mind and be so much the less if she hears about it." The clock struck; mugs were drained. "Closing time, souls," said Mr. Shillabeer; and five minutes later the company had separated and the bar was empty. The ’Dumpling’ mused on the things that his guests had uttered. "’Tis summed up in that word ’unexpected’ without a doubt," he thought. "Never the expected thing. And if we grant so much, then us never ought to expect the expected thing. They be all of a piece; and because my wife looked like living for ever, I ought to have knowed she’d die. I ought to have known it, and prepared for it, and laid in wait for it. Yet nobody was more surprised than me, and nobody less so than her when it leaked out of the doctor. She knowed it herself well enough; but hadn’t the heart to tell me." *CHAPTER X* *CRAZYWELL*