On Tuesday, the 4th of February Tom had been as usual to market. He had done his business early in the afternoon, but had been detained in town by the necessity of seeing Mr. Sykes in connection with the eternal lawsuit. Then he had to wait for a train so that it was long past the hour for the evening meal when he reached Ben Garside's house in Holmfirth. The tea-things had long been cleared away, but Hannah was soon bustling about preparing an appetising meal of broiled rashers, poached eggs, and tea and toasted teacake. The meal was grateful after the long wearying day. It had been a depressing day. The market had been slackly attended: the weather had something to do with that. It had rained pitilessly all day, a steady, persistent, dogged downpour, ceasing at times for the fragment of an hour, only to commence again, and so on, as if it never meant to stop. And as it was on the Tuesday, so it had been for three or four days before. At the "ordinary" at the Queen Hotel, kept by Mrs. Beevers, in the Market Street, the manufacturers from the valleys of the Colne and the Holme were full of talk of choked tail-goits water piled back into the wheel-race so that the wheel refused to turn upon its axis. The merchants shook their heads gloomily over the mild, open weather. They declared, as their grandchildren declare to-day, that when they were boys winter was winter; but now there was no depending on the weather, and the almanac was a snare and a delusion. Tom lingered over his meal, luxuriating in the warmth of the room, and the pleasing rest of mind and body. But about nine o'clock the rain abated. The moon glided high in the heavens, sailing in and out among the masses of the drifting clouds. It looked as if the weather might take up after all. It was time it did. But wet or fine Tom had work to do he had fixed to do that night, work which could only be done at the mill, and which were better done that night. That done, the morrow would be clear for the morrow's work. He would have an hour at his account books, he told Ben, and sleep at the mill, and Jack--you have not, reader, forgotten Work'us Jack--should bear him company. Hannah protested in vain that "Tom was killing himself with overwork. Flesh and blood couldn't stand it, and Tom would never make old banes if he went on at that noit. It was bad enough to kill one's self to keep one's self, but it was ten times worse to kill one's self building a house o' cards, only to be blown down by that Jabez Tinker."