‘Why should I not be smart,’ she said, ’when my man has come to me?  For whose eyes shall I put on the raiment that is his own but for his?  I was much lower than a widow in the eyes of all men; but now I have got my husband back again.  And my boy shall wear the very best that he has, so that his father may see him smile at his own gaudiness.  Yes, father, I may be smart now.  There were moments in which I thought that I might never wear more the pretty things which he had given me.’  Then she rose from her seat again, and hung on his neck, and wept and sobbed till he feared that her heart-strings would break with joy.

So the morning passed away among them till about eleven o’clock, when the servant brought in word that Mr. Holt and one or two other of the tenants wanted to see the young master.  The squire had been sitting alone in the back room so that the husband and wife might be left together; but he had heard voices with which he was familiar, and he now came through to ask Hester whether the visitors should be sent away for the present.  But Hester would not have turned a dog from the door which had been true to her husband through his troubles.  ‘Let them come,’ she said.  ’They have been so good to me, John, through it all!  They have always known that baby was a true Caldigate.’

Holt and the other farmers were shown into the room, and Holt as a matter of course became the spokesman.  When Caldigate had shaken hands with them all round, each muttering his word of welcome, then Holt began:  ’We wish you to know, squoire, that we, none of us, ain’t been comfortable in our minds here at Folking since that crawling villain Crinkett came and showed himself at our young squire’s christening.’

‘That we ain’t,’ said Timothy Purvidge, another Netherden farmer.

‘I haven’t had much comfort since that day myself, Mr. Purvidge,’ said Caldigate,—­’not till this morning.’

‘Nor yet haven’t none of us,’ continued Mr. Holt, very impressively.  ’We knowed as you had done all right.  We was as sure as the church tower.  Lord love you, sir, when it was between our young missus,—­who’ll excuse me for noticing these bright colours, and for saying how glad I am to see her come out once again as our squire’s wife should come out,—­between her and that bedangled woman as I seed in the court, it didn’t take no one long to know what was the truth!’ The eloquence here was no doubt better than the argument, as Caldigate must have felt when he remembered how fond he had once been of that ‘bedangled woman.’  Hester, who, though she knew the whole story, did not at this moment join two and two together, thought that Mr. Holt put the case uncommonly well.  ‘No! we knew,’ he continued, with a wave of his hand.  ’But the jury weren’t Netherden men,—­nor yet Utterden, Mr. Halfacre,’ he added, turning to a tenant from the other parish.  ’And they couldn’t tell how it all was as we could.  And there was that judge, who would have believed