Swinging home through the wood, through aisles flooded only with moonlight, the young lovers soon left the thought of death behind them. Indeed from the hut itself there had soon come following them the careless strains of the incurable caroller:

“What a hefty basket!” said Will at last. “Whatever have you been carrying the old codger?”

“It’s what I’m carrying off,” she laughed. “But give it me, if it’s too much for your poor arm.”

“It’s not so heavy as my box,” he smiled.

“But it saves carrying that,” she said happily.

“How do you mean?”

“That’s your farm in there—your English farm! Australia is off.” She enjoyed his obvious fear that the scene in the hut had been too much for her brain. “Goose!” she cried. “Goose with the golden eggs. Just take a peep.”

“There’s only your jug and teapot.” He was more mystified than ever.

But her happiness waned again when the riddle was read.

“You surely don’t expect me to pocket your money,” he said, as soon as his slower brain had taken in the situation.

“Oh, Will! Surely what is mine is yours!”

“Not at all. What is mine is yours.”

“But that’s what I said.”

“Don’t turn and twist—I know you’re cleverer than me.”

Her hand sought his. “Don’t let us have a storm in a teapot!”

But he rumbled on. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow—it’s the man says that.”

“You’ve been reading the marriage service.”

“And how would you know it, if you hadn’t?”

That suspended the debate on a kiss. “You see I’d be almost as bad as poor Charley Mott,” he pointed out.

“I see,” she said humbly. Indeed she felt herself so much a part of him now that she wondered how she could have failed to look at it from his point of view. Her defeat of his coach—under Providence—had humiliated him enough. To have turned suddenly into an heiress was an aggravation of her success; now to make him appear a fortune-hunter would be the last straw.

“But couldn’t I buy the farm and you rent it of me?” she ventured, with a memory of Hezekiah Bidlake.

“Everybody would think just the same——”

“Well, but somewhere else—where nobody knows us——?”

“You wouldn’t come somewhere else—not till I’m eighty!”

“Don’t be absurd! Anyhow you’ll look beautiful with a white beard.”

“Why not get him a minder with the money? Then we could go to Australia together.”

“Leave him to a stranger! He’d die. But so long as the farm was in England, it wouldn’t be so bad, even if I couldn’t come just yet.”

He did not answer, and as they walked on silently, her daydreams resurged, her nipped buds began bursting into wonderful flower. They parted at her door without further reference to money questions, but her face was brimming with happiness as the pot with guineas.

In that rosy mood—when her grandfather, nid-nodding over the hearth, roused at her return—she could not refrain from pouring out her teapot on the table, and changing his grumbles at her absence into squeaks of delight. She meant to pour out her story too, but he cut her short.

“That’s mine!” he cried, exultant. “That’s the gold Sidrach brought me!”

“No, no, Gran’fer. That comes from——!”

“But there’s the wery spade guineas!” He dabbled his claws in the coins.

“Oh, is that what they are? But there’s heads of Victoria, too.”

“That’s what he saved in Babylon. Dedn’t Oi say as he died warrum?”

“But you must listen, Gran’fer. Uncle Lilliwhyte——” she recapitulated the story.

“They’re mine anyways!” He scooped them up in his skinny palms and let them fall into the pot with a voluptuous clang. “Ye gits quite enough out o’ my biznus.”

This seemed so exactly the reverse of Will’s attitude that she found herself smiling ruefully at the way she was caught again between her “two mules.” But she could not thus lose her marriage-portion. “Uncle Lilliwhyte gave them to me for myself,” she said firmly.

“And don’t ye owe me back all the money Oi paid when your feyther died?”

Jinny was taken aback. “How much did you pay?”

“Hunderds and hunderds. Dedn’t, he’d a-been a disgraced corpse, and your mother too.”

Jinny was silent. The Angel-Mother seemed rustling overhead. The Gaffer closed shutters and bolted doors with rigorous precautions, and hugging the teapot to his bosom stumbled up to bed. Depressed by this unexpected seizure of her windfall, she found herself too utterly weary after her long day’s work and excitement to open the shutters again, much as she disliked an airless room; she had scarcely energy to pull out her chest of drawers. For a few minutes she watched from her bed the blue flickering flame of the log, then knew no more till suddenly she saw above the dead fire a monstrous shadow curling over the chimney-piece and along the ceiling: in another instant she traced it to something still more horrible—her grandfather’s legless trunk appearing over the hearthstone, with his nightlight in one hand and the teapot in the other. The rush-candle shook in its holed tin cylinder and set his grisly counterpart dancing. Jinny’s blood ran cold. Evidently some one had murdered him for the gold and this was his ghost. Then she told herself it was one of her nightmares, and she looked around for Henry Brougham, Esq., to clear up the situation. But with a soft thud the trunk dropped as through a trap-door and there was nothing left but a great glimmering hole where the hearthstone should have been. Instantly she realized that it was only a secret hiding-place in which her magpie of a grandfather was bestowing the treasure—yes, there was the hearthstone slewed round as on a pivot. This must be that old smugglers’ storehouse he and gossip had sometimes hinted at—with perhaps the long underground passages of ancient legend, reaching to Beacon Chimneys, nay, to the parsonage itself.

She closed her eyes carefully as his shadow heralded his re-ascent. He came up almost as noiselessly as that giant spectre, and between her lids she saw him scrutinize her. Reassured to see his shanks again, she emitted one of his snores, wondering whimsically if she did snore, or if any other girl had ever heard herself snore, and a smile almost broke the impassivity of her cheeks. Satisfied with the snore, he stooped down and she saw the hearthstone veer back to its place. “Well, I can always get it when I want it,” she thought cheerfully, as his slow stockinged feet bore him and his more sinister shadow upstairs.

For some time she lay awake, pondering over the fate of her money, which seemed like Cleopatra’s to be “in bonds,” and wondering whether poor Uncle Lilliwhyte was still alive; then everything faded into a vision of Mr. Flippance jogging marionettes for rugged miners who poured out their teapots at the box-office, reducing it to such a swamp that its boxes floated in the tea.

At breakfast, finding her grandfather abnormally restless, she asked him a little maliciously if he had slept all right.

“Oi’ll sleep better to-night,” he said, and chuckled a little. He seemed indeed very happy at having his treasure so well warded, and though his exuberance was alarming, she felt that the excitement of happiness was a lesser danger than that long depression of penuriousness. If the defeat of the coach had seemed to give him a second lease of life, what might not his new wealth do for him? He might really become an Old Parr, and poor Will be kept waiting till the twentieth century!

It was thus with only a moderate uneasiness that she left him, stealing with her basket to the rendezvous at the hut. In the wood she met Ravens hurrying to find breakfast, and he sang out that Martha and Will had relieved him, and that Uncle Lilliwhyte was better. As she approached the clearing, she saw the old woman come out of the hut with a bottle in her hand and a face absolutely transfigured. The whining, peevish, latter-day Martha was gone: a radiance almost celestial illumined her features—it seemed to transcend even the bonnet and to rim it with a halo. This was a woman walking not on the dead dank leaves of a frost-grey wood, but through the streets of the New Jerusalem. Behind her came Will, with a little cynical smile playing about his mouth till he espied Jinny, when his face took on the same ecstatic glow as his mother’s. Jinny could not but feel enkindled in her turn by all this spiritual effulgence, and it was three glorified countenances that met on this March morning.

“He’s broken bread with me,” breathed Martha, “and I’ve helped him put on the Saving Name.” She displayed her bottle with drops of water beaded on the mouth. She had baptized—albeit only by an unavoidable reversion to sprinkling—her first convert. The dream of years had been fulfilled at last, and the apostolic triumph had lifted her beyond humanity, fired her with a vision in which, a conquistador of faith, she was to turn all Little Bradmarsh, nay, Chipstone itself, into one vast synagogue. This were indeed the New Jerusalem. “And it was Will that led my feet,” she said, kissing him to his disconcertment. “And go where he may now, Jinny, he can’t take that away from me. And I shall always have his letter to inspire me to win other souls.” She touched the left side of her bodice, and poor Jinny, suddenly reminded that her grandfather had robbed her of her last chance of keeping Will in England, felt envious of Martha’s exalted source of consolation.

“I’ve got to go now and cook Flynt’s dinner,” said Martha. “But he won’t have much appetite for it if he’s got any right feeling left, when he hears that another man, a stranger, has been before him in the path of righteousness. Maybe you’ll write to the Lightstand, Willie, to say there’s a new brother in Little Bradmarsh.”

“I’ll tell ’em the Ecclesia has doubled its membership,” said Will, with a faint wink at Jinny, to which the girl did not respond. “Do you think, mother,” he asked with mock seriousness, “the New Jerusalem will come down in Australia same as here?”

“Of course,” said Martha.

Again Will winked at Jinny. But she frowned and shook her head. Her study of Australia had instructed her sufficiently that it was on the other side of the globe, and she knew that Will was having fun with the idea of the golden city coming down two opposite ways at once, but she felt it criminal to break Martha’s mood, and indeed was not certain she herself understood how the Australians escaped falling off into space. Discouraged by her stern face, Will murmured he’d put his mother on the road and be back. She smiled and nodded at the promise, but her heart was heavy with a sense of inevitable partings as she went in to the lingering ancient.

The death-bed conversion was evidently a success, for she found him almost as radiant as Martha, though with a more unearthly light, while the gleaming as of dewdrops on his dishevelled hair, and the stains of damp over his bolster seemed to convict his spiritual preceptress of a dangerous recklessness. But he was probably beyond saving in any case, Jinny reflected, and what other medicine could have given him that happy exaltation? The logs roared in the stove, and all was joy and warmth that rimy morning.

“Oi’ve tarned a Christy Dolphin!” he announced jubilantly.

“Yes, I’m so glad. Drink this before it gets cold.”

He waved it away. “Oi suspicioned all the time as that be the right religion. No hell at all, ye just goos to sleep, and when the New Jerusalem comes down for they righteous, ye don’t git up.”

“You’ll wake up—you and your mother,” she assured him, standing her jug by the stove.

“That’s what Mrs. Flynt says. ‘Ye ain’t done no harm,’ she says, ‘and when the trumpet blows for the saints, your bones will git their flesh agen, same as now.’”

There was little enough on them to go through eternity in, she thought, gazing at his shrunken arms, which he had left outside the coverings in repudiating the tea. “Won’t that be wonderful!” she said, the tears in her eyes.

“That’ll be wunnerful wunnerful,” he agreed. “That fares to be what Oi calls a real heaven—your own body, not a sort o’ smoke-cloud ye wouldn’t know was you ef you met it, your own flesh and blood, livin’ on this lovely earth with the birds and the winds and the sun and the water, all a-singin’ and a-shinin’ for ever and ever. And no bad folks ne yet angels to worrit ye, no liddle boys to call arter ye—why it’s just ginnick! Oi reckon Oi’ll choose this same old spot.”

“Yes, it’s a lovely spot,” said Jinny, but she wondered whether he had not made his own version of Martha’s New Jerusalem, which she herself had always understood to be more jewelled than natural.

“Your mother will be able to see it too,” she added gently, as she put the tea to his lips.

A beautiful smile traversed the sunken features. But suddenly a frenzy of terror swamped it. He sat up with a jerk that dashed her jug to the stove, shivering it into fragments. “But ef Oi waked, Oi’d need my money agen!” he shrilled.

What Jinny always remembered most vividly, when she recalled this tragic moment, was the red lettering on the sacks he lay on, exposed by his upright posture.

“Gay, Bird & Co., Colchester,” her eyes read mechanically. When he fell back and hid that inscription, his face was at peace again. That acuteness of terror—the quintessence of the morbidity of a lifetime—had stopped his heart.

She was terribly shaken by this sudden and grotesque end. She felt his pulse, but without hope. She had never seen human death before, but she had a vague idea that you closed the eyes and put pennies on them. She had no pennies with her. She remembered there were some in the sack he lay on, pennies and shillings, but she did not dare disturb him to get at them. She was obscurely glad she had not to wrestle with the problem of whether she ought to get his teapot buried with him, for the contingency of his resurrection. Her grandfather would never surrender it, she felt, and if she descended into his mysterious underground and abstracted it, that might upset his wits altogether. Besides, Uncle Lilliwhyte’s face was now taking on a strange beauty, as though his pecuniary anxieties were allayed.

But her nerves were giving way—she threw open the door and looked out eagerly, not for the lover, but for the man who seemed necessary in these rough moments. The dead must not be left alone, she knew that, or she would have set out to meet Will. Perhaps if she left him alone, his shy friend the fox would come trotting in, now he was so still. The parish authorities must doubtless be summoned to take charge of him. But ought he to have a pauper funeral—ought she not to steal back enough of his money to save him from that? But she remembered with relief that he had expressed indifference as to what became of his body—so long as it was restored to earth, its good old mother. As she moved a few paces without, in her peering for Will, she saw the blue smoke rising through the three top-hats, and in spite of the dead man’s doctrines and apprehensions, she could not help fancying it was his spirit soaring towards the abode of the Angel-Mother.

When Will returned, she was relieved to find Ravens striding beside him. That sunny-souled factotum, who had meant to hie to the Skindle wedding, now found himself transformed instead into a corpse-watcher, while Will, taking Jinny a bit of his way, went off by the shortest cuts to Chipstone Poorhouse, as probably the centre of authority for parish funerals.

“There’s the coroner, too,” Ravens called after him.

“Will there be an inquest?” Jinny asked.

“Must be,” said Will, and Jinny, alarmed for Martha’s sake, ran back on pretence of her basket, and surreptitiously wiped the bolster. As they left the clearing, they heard Ravens singing in the hut.