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grimly.
    “Do you think I go about with my pockets full of death
certificates?” he said. Then he was gone, and the door shut to behind
him.
    Elizabeth moved, and spoke.
    “I will tell Markham that you are ready to go home,” she said.
    CHAPTER V. TOWN TALK
    As long as idle dogs will bark, and idle asses bray,
    As long as hens will cackle over every egg they lay,
      So long will folks be chattering,
      And idle tongues be clattering,
    For the less there is to talk about, the more there is to say.
    THE obituary notices of old Mr. Mottisfont which appeared in due
course in the two local papers were of a glowingly appreciative nature,
and at least as accurate as such notices usually are. David could not
help thinking how much the old gentleman would have relished the fine
phrases and the flowing periods. Sixty years of hard work were
compressed into two and a half columns of palpitating journalese. David
preferred the old man's own version, which had fewer adjectives and a
great deal more backbone.
    “My father left me nothing but debts—and William. The ironworks
were in a bad way, and we were on the edge of a bankruptcy. I was
twenty-one, and William was fifteen, and every one shook their heads. I
can see 'em now. Well, I gave some folk the rough side of my tongue,
and some the smooth. I had to have money, and no one would lend. I got
a little credit, but I could n't get the cash. Then I hunted up my
father's cousin, Edward Moberly. Rolling he was, and as close as wax.
Bored to death too, for all his money. I talked to him, and he took to
me. I talked to him for three days, and he lent me what I wanted, on my
note of hand, and I paid it all back in five years, and the interest
up-to-date right along. It took some doing but I got it done. Then the
thing got a go on it, and we climbed right up. And folks stopped
shaking their heads. I began to make my mark. I began to be a
'respected fellow-citizen.' Oh, Lord, David, if you 'd known William
you 'd respect me too! Talk about the debts—as a handicap, they were
n't worth mentioning in the same breath with William. I could talk
people into believing I was solvent, but I could n't talk 'em into
believing that William had any business capacity. And I could n't pay
off William, same as I paid off the debts.”
    David's recollections plunged him suddenly into a gulf of black
depression. Such a plucky old man, and now he was dead—out of the
way—and he, David, had lent a hand to cover the matter over, and
shield the murderer. David took the black fit to bed with him at night,
and rose in the morning with the gloom upon him still. It became a
shadow which went with him in all his ways and clung about his every
thought. And with the gloom there came upon him a horrible, haunting
recurrence of his old passion for Mary. The wound made by her rejection
of him had been slowly skinning over, but in the scene which they had
shared, and the stress of the emotions raised by it, this wound had
broken out afresh, and now it was no more a deep clean cut, but a
festering thing that bid fair to poison all the springs of life. At
Mary's bidding he had violated a trust, and his own sense of honour.
There were times when he hated Mary. There were times when he craved
for her. And always his contempt for himself deepened, and with it the
gloom—the black gloom.
    “The doctor gets through a sight of whisky these days,” remarked
Mrs. Havergill, David's housekeeper. “And a more abstemious gentleman,
I 'm sure I never did live with. Weeks a bottle of whisky 'ud last,
unless he 'd friends in. And now—gone like a flash, as you might say.
Only, just you mind there 's not a word of this goes out of the 'ouse,
Sarah, my girl. D' ye hear?”
    Sarah, a whey-faced girl whose arms and legs were set on at
uncertain angles, only nodded. She adored David with the unreasoning
affection of a dog, and had he taken to washing in whisky instead of
merely