staying. Poor Eliza wouldn't last more than a few days; a week or two at
most, and he was not going to keep on the cottage after he'd buried her.

Aye, poor Eliza! She was his sister-in-law, the widow of his second
brother. He had been his brother's lodger during the greater part of his
working life, and since Tom's death he had stayed on with Eliza. She and
he suited each other, and the 'worritin childer' had all gone away years
since and left them in peace. He didn't believe Eliza knew where any of
them were, except Mary, 'married over to Luton'--and Jim, and Jim's
Louisa. And a good riddance too. There was not one of them knew how to
keep a shilling when they'd got one. Still, it was a bit lonesome for
Eliza now, with no one but Jim's Louisa to look after her.

He grew rather downhearted as he trudged along, thinking. She and he had
stuck together 'a many year.' There would be nobody left for him to go
along with when she was gone. There was his niece Bessie Costrell and
her husband, and there was his silly old cousin Widow Waller. He dared
say they'd both of them want him to live with them. At the thought a
grin crossed his ruddy face. They both knew about _it_--that was what it
was. And he wouldn't live with either of them, not he. Not yet a bit,
anyway. All the same, he had a fondness for Bessie and her husband.
Bessie was always very civil to _him_--he chuckled again--and if
anything had to be done with _it_, while he was five miles off at
Frampton on a job of work that had been offered him, he didn't know but
he'd as soon trust Isaac Costrell and Bessie as anybody else. You might
call Isaac rather a fool, what with his religion, and 'extempry prayin,
an that,' but all the same Bolderfield thought of him with a kind of
uneasy awe. If ever there was a man secure of the next world it was
Isaac Costrell. His temper, perhaps, was 'nassty,' which might pull him
down a little when the last account came to be made up; and it could not