woman. "You can understand that no good can come of a lie." Dan Morris scratched his head. "Speak out, man, when I tell you," said Crawley.
"Drat it all," said Dan, "where's the use of so much jaw about it?"
"Say you know his reverence is as innocent as the babe as isn't born," said the woman.
"No; I won't,—say nothing of the kind," said Dan.
"Speak out the truth," said Crawley.
"They do say, among 'em," said Dan, "that you picked it up, and then got a woolgathering in your head till you didn't rightly know where it come from." Then he paused. "And after a bit you guv' it me to get the money. Didn't you, now?"
"I did."
"And they do say if a poor man had done it, it'd been stealing, for sartain."
"And I'm a poor man,—the poorest in all Hogglestock; and, therefore, of course, it is stealing. Of course I am a thief. Yes; of course I am a thief. When did not the world believe the worst of the poor?" Having so spoken, Mr. Crawley rose from his chair and hurried out of the cottage, waiting no further reply from Dan Morris or his wife. And as he made his way slowly home, not going there by the direct road, but by a long circuit, he told himself that there could be no sympathy for him anywhere. Even Dan Morris, the brickmaker, thought that he was a thief.
"And am I a thief?" he said to himself, standing in the middle of the road, with his hands up to his forehead.
It was nearly nine before Mr. Crawley got back to his house, and found his wife and daughter waiting breakfast for him. "I should not wonder if Grace were over here to-day," said Mrs. Crawley. "She'd better remain where she is," said he. After this the meal passed almost without a word. When it was over, Jane, at a sign from her mother, went up to her father and asked him whether she should read
