She rubbed her eyes; she pinched her arms.  Was she in her senses or not?  Sure never was such a situation heard of!  The cup of hope presented palpably to her lips, only to vanish again—­she could not tell how—­and leave no sign.  A very disagreeable doubt—­not yet a suspicion—­began to dawn over Mrs. Peckaby.  Had she been made the subject of a practical joke?

She might have flung the doubt from her, but for a distant sound that came faintly on her ears—­the sound of covert laughter.  Her doubt turned to conviction.  Her face became hot; her heart, but for the anger at it, would have grown sick with the disappointment.  Her conductors and the donkey were retreating, having played their joke out!  Two certainties forced themselves upon her mind.  One, that Peckaby and his friends had planned it; she felt sure now that the biggest of the “brothers” had been nobody but Chuff, the blacksmith:  the other certainty was, that she should never be sent for to New Jerusalem in any way.  Why it should have been, Mrs. Peckaby could not have told, then or afterwards; but the positive conviction that Brother Jarrum had been false, that the story of sending for her on a white donkey had only been invented to keep her quiet, fixed itself in her mind in that moment in the lonely wood.  She sunk down amidst the trees and sobbed bitterly.

But all the tears combined that the world ever shed could not bring her nearer to New Jerusalem, or make her present situation better.  After awhile she had the sense to remember that.  She rose from the ground, turned her gown up over her shoulders, found her way out of the wood, and set off on her walk back again in a very humble frame of mind, arriving home as the clock was striking two.

She could make nobody hear.  She knocked at the door, she knocked at the window, gently at first, then louder; she called and called, but there came no answer.  Some of the neighbours, aroused by the unwonted disturbance, came peeping at their windows.  At length Peckaby opened his; thrusting his head out at the very casement from which Mrs. Peckaby had beheld the deceitful vision earlier in the night.

“Who’s there?” called out Peckaby.

“It’s me, Peckaby,” was the answer, delivered in a forlorn tone.  “Come down and open the door.”

“Who’s ’me’?” asked Peckaby.

“It’s me,” repeated Mrs. Peckaby, looking up.

And what with her height and the low casement, their faces were really not many inches apart; but yet Peckaby appeared not to know her.

“You be off, will you!” retorted he.  “A pretty thing if tramps be to come to decent folks’ doors and knock ’em up like this.  Who’s door did you take it for?”

“It’s me!” screamed Mrs. Peckaby.  “Don’t you know me?  Come and undo the door, and let me come in.  I be sopping.”

“Know you!  How should I know you?  Who be you?”

“Good heavens, Peckaby! you must know me.  Ain’t I your wife?”