Alas, they grew harder.

After Emily, two children were successively born; fate was kind to them, and neither survived infancy.

Their mother fell into fretting, into hysteria; some change in her life seemed imperative, and at length she persuaded her husband to quit the town in which they lived, and begin life anew elsewhere.

Begin life anew! James Hood was forty years old; he possessed, as the net result of his commercial enterprises, a capital of a hundred and thirty pounds.

The house, of course, could be let, and would bring five-and-twenty pounds a year.