THE MOP.—THE SHOP.—WHAT THE CHEAP JACK’S WIFE HAD TO TELL.—WHAT GEORGE WITHHELD.  
A mop is a local name for a hiring-fair, at which young men and women present themselves to be hired as domestic servants or farm laborers for a year.  It was at a mop that the windmiller had hired George, and it was at that annual festival that his long service came to an end.  He betook himself to the town, where the fair was going on, not with any definite intention of seeking another master, but from a variety of reasons: partly for a holiday, and to “see the fun;” partly to visit the Cheap Jack, and hear what advice he had to give, and to learn what was in the letter; partly with the idea that something might suggest itself in the busy town as a suitable investment for his savings and his talents.  At the worst, he could but take another place.
 
The sun shone brightly on the market-place as George passed through it.  The scene was quaint and picturesque.  Booths, travelling shows, penny theatres, quack doctors, tumblers, profile cutters, exhibitors and salesmen of all sorts, thronged the square, and overflowed into a space behind, where some houses had been burnt down and never rebuilt; whilst round the remains of the market cross in the centre were grouped the lads and lasses “on hire.”  The girls were smartly dressed, and the young men in snowy smocks, above which peeped waistcoats of gay colors, looked in the earlier part of the day so spruce, that it was as lamentable to see them after the hours of beer-drinking and shag tobacco-smoking which followed, as it was to see what might have been a neighborly and cheerful festival finally swamped in drunkenness and debauchery.
 
George’s smock was white, and George’s waistcoat was red, and he had made himself smart enough, but he did not linger amongst his fellow-servants at the Cross.  He hurried through the crowd, nodding sheepishly in answer to a shower of chaff and greetings, and made his way to the by-street where the Cheap Jack had a small dingy shop for the sale of coarse pottery.  Some people were spiteful enough to hint that the shop-trade was of much less value to him than the store-room attached, where the goods were believed to be not all of one kind.
 
The red bread-pans, pipkins, flower-pots, and so forth, were grouped about the door with some attempt at effective display, and with cheap prices marked in chalk upon their sides.  The window was clean, and in it many knick-knacks of other kinds were mixed with the smaller china ware.  And, when George entered the shop, the hunchback’s wife was behind the counter.  Like Mrs. Lake, he paused to think where he could have seen her before; the not uncomely face marred by an ugly mouth, in which the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower lip large and heavy, seemed familiar to him.  He was still beating his brains when the Cheap Jack came in.
 
George had been puzzled that the woman’s countenance did not seem new to him, and he was puzzled and disturbed also that the expression on the face of the Cheap Jack was quite new.  Whatever the hunchback had in his head, however, he was not unfriendly in his manner.
 
“Good morning, George, my dear!” he cried, cheerfully; “you’ve seen my missus before, eh, George?”  George was just about to say no, when he remembered that he had seen the woman, and when and where.
 
“Dreadful night that was, Mr. Sannel!” said the Cheap Jack’s wife, with a smile on her large mouth.  George assented, and by the hospitable invitation of the newly married couple he followed them into the dwelling part of the house, trying as he did so to decide upon a plan for his future conduct.
 
Here at last was a woman who could probably tell all that he wanted to know about the mystery on which he had hoped to trade, and—the Cheap Jack had married her.  If any thing could be got out of the knowledge of Jan’s history, the Cheap Jack, and not George, would get it now.  The hasty resolution to which George came was to try to share what he could not keep entirely to himself.  He flattered himself he could be very civil, and—he had got the letter.
 
It proved useful.  George was resolved not to show it until he had got at something of what the large-mouthed woman had to tell; and, as she wanted to see the letter, she made a virtue of necessity, and seemed anxious to help the miller’s man to the utmost of her power.
 
The history of her connection with Jan’s babyhood was soon told, and she told it truthfully.
 
Five years before her marriage to the Cheap Jack, she was a chambermaid in a small hotel in London, and “under notice to leave.”  Why—she did not deem it necessary to tell George.  In this hotel Jan was born, and Jan’s mother died.  She was a foreigner, it was supposed, and her husband also, for they talked a foreign language to each other.  He was not with her when she first came, but he joined her afterwards, and was with her at her death.  So far the Cheap Jack’s wife spoke upon hearsay.  Though employed at the hotel, which was very full, she was not sleeping in the house; she was not on good terms with the landlady, nor even with the other servants, and her first real connection with the matter was when the gentleman, overhearing some “words” between her and the landlady at the bar, abruptly asked her if she were in want of employment.  He employed her,—to take the child to the very town where she was now living as the Cheap Jack’s wife.  He did not come with her, as he had to attend his wife’s funeral.  It was understood at the hotel that he was going to take the body abroad for interment.  So the porter had said.  The person to whom she was directed to bring the child was a respectable old woman, living in the outskirts of the town, whose business was sick-nursing.  She seemed, however, to be comfortably off, and had not been out for some time.  She had been nurse to the gentleman in his childhood, so she once told the Cheap Jack’s wife with tears.  But she was always shedding tears, either over the baby, or as she sat over her big Bible, “for ever having to wipe her spectacles, and tears running over her nose ridic’lus to behold.”  She was pious, and read the Bible aloud in the evening.  Then she had fainting fits; she could not go uphill or upstairs without great difficulty, and she had one of her fits when she first saw the child.  If with these infirmities of body and mind the ex-nurse had been easily managed, the Cheap Jack’s wife professed that she could have borne it with patience.  But the old woman was painfully shrewd, and there was no hoodwinking her.  She never allowed the Cheap Jack’s wife to go out without her, and contrived, in spite of a hundred plans and excuses, to prevent her from speaking to any of the townspeople alone.  Never, said Sal, never could she have put up with it, even for the short time before the gentleman came down to them, but for knowing it would be a paying job.  But his arrival was the signal for another catastrophe, which ended in Jan’s bec............