‘I’ll attend here, go you up stairs,’ said Nutter.  He spoke strangely, and looked odd, and altogether seemed strung up to a high pitch.

Out went Betty, seeing it was no good dawdling; for her master was resolute and formidable.  The room, like others in old-fashioned houses with thick walls, had a double door.  He shut the one with a stern slam, and then the other; and though the honest maid loitered in the hall, and, indeed, placed her ear very near the door, she was not much the wiser.

There was some imperfectly heard talk in the parlour, and cries, and sobs, and more talking.  Then before Betty was aware, the door suddenly opened, and out came Mary Matchwell, with gleaming eyes, and a pale laugh of spite and victory and threw a look, as she passed, upon the maid that frightened her, and so vanished into her coach.

Nutter disengaged himself from poor Mrs. Nutter’s arms, in which he was nearly throttled, while she sobbed and shrieked—­

’Oh!  Charley, dear—­dearest Charley—­Charley, darling—­isn’t it frightful?’ and so on.

‘Betty, take care of her,’ was all he said, and that sternly, like a man quietly desperate, but with a dismal fury in his face.

He went into the little room on the other side of the now darkening hall, and shut the door, and locked it inside.  It was partly because he did not choose to talk just now any more with his blubbering and shrieking wife.  He was a very kind husband, in his way, but a most incapable nurse, especially in a case of hysterics.

He came out with a desk in his hands.

‘Moggy,’ he said, in a low tone, seeing his other servant-woman in the dusk crossing at the foot of the stairs, ’here, take this desk, leave it in our bed-room—­’tis for the mistress; tell her so by-and-by.’

The wench carried it up; but poor Mrs. Nutter was in no condition to comprehend anything, and was talking quite wildly, and seemed to be growing worse rather than better.

Nutter stood alone in the hall, with his back to the door from which he had just emerged, his hands in his pockets, and the same dreary and wicked shadow over his face.

‘So that——­Sturk will carry his point after all,’ he muttered.

On the hall wainscot just opposite hung his horse-pistols; and when he saw them, and that wasn’t for a while—­for though he was looking straight at them, he was staring, really, quite through the dingy wooden panel at quite other objects three hundred miles away—­when he did see them, I say, he growled in the same tone—­

’I wish one of those bullets was through my head, so t’other was through his.’