Half an hour afterward I looked out again.

The wind had lulled with the sunset, but the mist was rising, and
a heavy rain was beginning to fall. Never did the lonely prospect
of the moor look so dreary as it looked to my eyes that evening.
Never did I regret any slight thing more sincerely than I then
regretted the leaving of Mr. Knifton's pocketbook in my charge. I
cannot say that I suffered under any actual alarm, for I felt
next to certain that neither Shifty Dick nor Jerry had got a
chance of setting eyes on so small a thing as the pocketbook
while they were in the kitchen; but there was a kind of vague
distrust troubling me--a suspicion of the night--a dislike of
being left by myself, which I never remember having experienced
before. This feeling so increased after I had closed the door and
gone back to the kitchen, that, when I heard the voices of the
quarrymen as they passed our cottage on their way home to the
village in the valley below Moor Farm, I stepped out into the
passage with a momentary notion of telling them how I was
situated, and asking them for advice and protection.

I had hardly formed this idea, however, before I dismissed it.
None of the quarrymen were intimate friends of mine. I had a
nodding acquaintance with them, and believed them to be honest
men, as times
went. But my own common sense told me that what little knowledge
of their characters I had was by no means sufficient to warrant
me in admitting them into my confidence in the matter of the
pocketbook. I had seen enough of poverty and poor men to know
what a terrible temptation a large sum of money is to those whose