i 19ecbf681bdbdaf9 Read Online Free PDF

wife because I have been nothing but a servant to you. I sign myself Mary Clark, as I once was. "
    Nathaniel had said that the man had looked thunderstruck for a moment, and then had said, "D'you want payin' for readin' that?" And Nathaniel had answered, "I do not charge for reading letters, and that one has given me the greatest pleasure to convey." Her father, she understood, had screwed up his face and peered at Nathaniel as if he were puzzled by the answer. And it was a full two weeks before the puzzle was solved for him, and then only when he went into the market, where some toady commiserated with him about his daughter disgracing herself and going to live with the schoolmaster in Heap Hollow Cottage. And didn't he know the village was up in arms and the schoolmaster had been dismissed and the vicar had practically put a curse on them both?
    Perhaps it was fortunate that the day her father confronted her, in such a rage as to bring his spittle running down his chin and his hands clawing the air as he screamed at her, was the day the secondhand dealer from Fellburn had brought his flat cart full of oddments of furniture, including a bedstead, a chest of drawers, a wooden table, two chairs, and a large clip pie mat, besides kitchen utensils, and when he saw the red-faced farmer raise his hand to the nice young lass who had sat up on the front of the cart with him and had chatted all the way from the town, he had thrust himself between them, saying,
    "Look! mister. If you don't want to find yourself on your back, keep your hands down, and your voice an' all. " And her father had yelled at him, " She's my daughter and she's turned into a whore," to which the man retorted, " Well, if that's the case you won't want anything to do with her, will you? So be off! for I'll be stayin' till her man gets back from Fellburn where, she tells me, he's on business. "
    At this her father had yelled, "He's not her man, he's a schoolmaster who's been thrown out of his job. He's a waster, a married man."
    "Well, if that's the case, to my mind he's a nice waster, from what I saw of him yesterday. So will I have to tell you just once more to get goin'!"
    At this her father had thrust his head out towards her as he growled,
    "I'll see you crawling in the gutter. D'you hear? And I'll have the village about your ears. They won't put up with the likes of you; they'll stone you out. And you're no longer akin to me, nor is the one that bore you. Not a penny of mine will ever come your way. And you'll rot, d'you hear? You'll rot inside. You filthy hussy, you!
    "
    And at this she had cried back at him, "Well, as a filthy hussy I've worked for you since I could toddle, never less than fourteen hours a day and not a penny piece for it. An' the clothes on my back, an' my mother's, were droppin' off afore we could get a new rag. An' then they weren't new, were they? if you could manage to pick up something from the market stall. Even the food was begrudged us; we only got what you couldn't sell. Well, now you've got your money in the locked box in the attic, I hope it's a comfort to you, because you'll never have any other."
    She felt sure he was going to have a fit. And when she saw him turn his cold, glaring eyes on the man, she knew what was in his mind: she had told a stranger about the locked box in the attic. He would go back now to the house and move it, perhaps bury it, like the cross had been buried. At the thought of the cross she laughed inside. If he'd had even an inkling of what they had found, he would have gone mad, really mad.
    She had watched him walk away like someone drunk; but after he disappeared round the foot of the hill that bordered the hollow to the right of the cottage, her knees began to tremble so much that she felt she would fall to the ground. It was only the dealer's kindly tone that steadied her when he said, "Well, if I had to choose at ween him and the devil for me father, I know which side I'd jump to. Now don't take