last to ask: 'Be I to blow, mister? I 'm
kinder skeered like.'

So the organist's trouble turned him bitter and hard, and changed his
love for his daughter into cold resentment; he would not have her name
mentioned in his presence, and he refused to open a letter she sent him
a few weeks after her marriage, and bid Jane Sands send it back if she
knew the address of the person who sent it.

On her side, Edith was quite as obstinate and resentful. She had no
idea of humbling herself and asking pardon. She thought she had quite
a right to do as she liked, and she believed her father would be too
unhappy without her to bear the separation long. She very soon found
out the mistake she had made--indeed, even in the midst of her
infatuation about Martin Blake, I think there lurked a certain distrust
of him, and they had not been married many weeks--I might almost say
days--before this distrust was more than realised.

His feelings towards her, too, had been mere flattered vanity at being
preferred by such a superior sort of girl than any deeper feeling, and
vanity is not a sufficiently lasting foundation for married happiness,
especially when the cold winds of poverty blow on the edifice, and when
the superior sort of girl has not been brought up to anything useful,
and cannot cook the dinner, or iron a shirt, or keep the house tidy.

When his father, the old blacksmith at Bilton, died six months after
they were married, Martin wished to come back and take up the work
there, more especially as work was hard to get in London and living
dear; but Edith would not hear of it, and opposed it so violently that
she got her way, though Martin afterwards maintained that this decision
was the ruin of him, occasionally dating his ruin six months earlier,
from his wedding. Perhaps he was right, and he might have settled down
steadily in the old home and among the old neighbours in spite of his
fine-lady wife; but when he said so, Edith was quick to remember and
cast up at him the stories which she had disbelieved and ignored
before, to prove in their constant wranglings that place and
neighbourhood had nothing to do with his idleness and unsteadiness. No
one ever heard much of these five years in London, for Edith wrote no
more after that letter was returned.

Those five years made little difference at Downside, except in Mr
Robins' white hair and set lined face; the little house behind the
yew-hedge looked just the same, and