"I don't want you to go with me," said the man, rising. "I want to make you happy by giving you money."

"Have you any? And, if so, where did you get it?"

"I have none just yet, but I soon shall have. At the present moment I am the possessor of two coppers"--he produced them. "But in a week I shall have hundreds."

"And then you will go to gaol again," said his wife. "No, thank you, I don't want to have anything to do with you. I have suffered quite enough at your hands. How could I live with you when the child hates you so?"

"That's all your fault!"

"Not altogether, as I said before. His hatred of you is pre-natal; but I have fostered that hatred until--well, you saw how he received you to-night."

"You are pitiless," he said, hoarsely.

"I am what you have made me. Do you think I would allow my child to love you who have treated his mother so ill? He will never look upon you save with loathing and hate. I would die for the boy; it is the strongest passion of my nature, this love for him. Do you think I would share that love with you? No; Gilbert hates you--he always will--and as I said before, I have done my utmost to foster his hate. Oh, I thought I was sate from you here. Who told you of my hiding-place?"

"Marshall," said Jenner, sulkily.

"Ah you have seen him. And did he speak to you--a gaol-bird?"

"Yes, he did. I made him speak to me."

His wife looked curiously at him and significantly. "It is as I thought," she said. "You know something about him, and you have come down to blackmail him or Miss Cass. Well, go and do it, and get back into gaol if you can. I should be glad to see you in prison again. As it is, out you go--now!"

"I have no money--no shelter."

"I will give you five shillings," she said. "With that you can go to the village inn--it is only two miles away."

Jenner took out his red pocket-book and laid it on the table near the window. "I have a pencil and paper in this," he said. "What you lend me I will give you an I.O.U. for. I don't want your money."

"I decline," said his wife, turning from the open window, out of which she had been leaning. 

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