ays she went on with her books, but the more she read the
more miserable she became, because there was nobody with whom she could
interchange what she thought about them. She was alarmed at last to
find that something very much like hatred to her husband was beginning
to develop itself. She was alarmed because she was too much of an
Englishwoman to cherish the thought of any desperate remedy, such as
separation; and yet the prospect of increasing aversion, which appeared
to grow she knew not how, terrified her. One Monday afternoon she had
gone out to her usual haunt in the park, and near the monument she saw
somebody whom she presently recognised to be Mr. Armstrong, the vicar
of Marston-Cocking, a village about four miles from Cowfold. She knew
him because he had dealt with her husband, and she had met him in the
shop. Marston-Cocking was really nothing better than a hamlet, with a
little grey squat church with a little square tower. Adjoining the
churchyard was Mr. Armstrong's house. It was not by any means a model
parsonage. It was a very plain affair of red brick with a door in the
middle, a window with outside shutters on either side, and one story
above. There was a small garden in front, protected from the road by
white palings and a row of laurels. At the back was a bigger garden,
and behind that an orchard. It had one recommendation, worth to its
tenant all the beauty of a moss-covered manse in Devonshire, and that
was its openness. It was on a little sandy hill. For some
unaccountable reason there was a patch of sand in that part of the
country, delicious, bright, cheerful yellow and brown sand, lifting
itself into little cliffs here and there, pierced with the holes of the
sand-martin. It exhaled no fogs, and was never dull even on a November
day, when the clay-lands five miles away breathed a vapour which lay
blue and heavy on the furrows, and the miry paths, retaining in their
sullenness for weeks the impress of every footmark, almost pulled the
boots off the feet as you walked along them. At Marston, on the
contrary, the rain disappeared in an hour; and the landscape always
seemed in the depths of winter to retain something of summer sunshine.
The vicarage was open, open to every wind, and from the top rooms the
stars could be seen to rise and set, no trees intercepting the view.
Mr. Armstrong was a man of sixty, a widower with no children. His
income from his living was about two hundred po