But meanwhile he lived in a state of perpetual inward excitement which did not escape his wife.

She could get no clue to it, however, and became all the more forbidding in the household the more she was invaded by this wholly novel sense of difficulty in managing her husband.
Yet she was not without a sense that if she could but contrive to alter her ways with the children it would be well for her.

Mr.Gurney's cheque was safely put away in the Clough End bank, and clearly her best policy would have been to make things tolerable for the two persons on whose proceedings--if they did but know it!--the arrival of future cheques in some measure depended.

But Hannah had not the cleverness which makes the successful hypocrite.

And for some time past there had been a strange unmanageable change in her feelings towards Sandy's orphans.