bacon.... There was a sudden strangling spasm in her throat, and his
face swam into the sky on a mist of tears, which welled up in her eyes
as without another word she turned away.

His voice came after her piteously--

"Missus--missus--but you raised my wages last week."




§19

Her tears were dry by the time she reached home, but in the night they
flowed again, accompanied by angry sobs, which she choked in her pillow,
for fear of waking little Ellen.

She cried because she was humbled in her own eyes. It was as if a veil
had been torn from the last two years, and she saw her motives at last.
For two years she had endured an ignorant, inefficient servant simply
because his strength and good looks had enslaved her susceptible
womanhood....

Her father would never have acted as she had done; he would not have
kept Socknersh a single month; he would not have engaged him at
all--both Relf of Honeychild and Day of Slinches were more experienced
men, with better recommendations; and yet she had chosen
Socknersh--because his brown eyes had held and drowned her judgment, as
surely as they had held her image, so dwindled and wan, when she looked
into them that evening, between the setting sun and the rising moon.