s for keeping his wife secluded. Nor did his
conscience disturb him much--he was a man who had his conscience in very
good training--as to the unfairness of this proceeding. Marian was happy,
he told himself; and when time came for some change in the manner of
her existence, he doubted if the change would be for the better.

So the days and weeks and months had passed away, bringing little variety
with them, and none of what the world calls pleasure. Marian read and
worked and rambled in the country lanes and meadows with Ellen Carley,
and visited the poor people now and then, as she had been in the habit of
doing at Lidford. She had not very much to give them, but gave all she
could; and she had a gentle sympathetic manner, which made her welcome
amongst them, most of all where there were children, for whom she had
always a special attraction. The little ones clung to her and trusted
her, looking up at her lovely face with spontaneous affection.

William Carley, the bailiff, was a big broad-shouldered man, with a heavy
forbidding countenance, and a taciturn habit by no means calculated to
secure him a large circle of friends. His daughter and only child was
afraid of him; his wife had been afraid of him in her time, and had faded
slowly out of a life that had been very joyless, unawares, hiding her
illness from him to the last, as if it had been a sort of offence against
him to be ill. It was only when she was dying that the bailiff knew he
was going to lose her; and it must be confessed that he took the loss
very calmly.

Whatever natural grief he may have felt was carefully locked in his own
breast. His underlings, the farm-labourers, found him a little more
"grumpy" than usual, and his daughter scarcely dared open her lips to him
for a month after the funeral. But from that time forward Miss Carley,
who was rather a spirited damsel, took a very different tone with her
father. She was not to be crushed and subdued into a mere submissive
shadow, as her mother had been. She had a way of speaking her mind on all
occasions which was by no means agreeable to the bailiff. If he drank
too much overnight, she took care to tell him of it early next morning.
If he went about slovenly and unshaven, her sharp tongue took notice of
the fact. Yet with all this, she waited upon him, and provided for his
comfort in a most dutiful manner. She saved his money by her dexterous
management of the household, and was in all practical matt