mother’s lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life.  He exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania.  If you hadn’t known the man, you couldn’t have believed a human being—­one of the million crawling units on the earth—­could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance.  It was pitiful.  He went nowhere, and saw no one.  I believe he thought that Providence had sent a wife of high rank to his very door to enable him partially to wipe out his reproach.  She looked like a child when she came, but she shot up very suddenly into womanhood.  If you ask me if she was unhappy, I declare I don’t think so.  She had never realized, I should think, what it was to be snubbed or found fault with in her life.  She was a motherless child, and had lived with her old grandfather and her young father, and had been very much spoilt.  And they were both snatched away from her, as it were, in a breath; and she alone in the world, with an uncle who was only glad to get rid of her to her stranger guardian.  Well,—­she was too young and too bright and too gay to be much downcast for all the old women could do.  She laughed at their scolding, and when they tried severity she appealed to Sir Timothy.  The old doctor who was my predecessor here told me at the time that he thought she had bewitched Sir Timothy; but afterwards he said that he believed it was only that Sir Timothy had made up his mind even then to quarter the Setoun arms with his own.  Anyway, he went against his sisters for the first and only time in his life, and they learnt that Lady Mary was not to be interfered with.  Whether it was gratitude or just the childish satisfaction of triumphing over her two enemies, I can’t tell, but she married him in less than two years after she came to live at Barracombe.  The old ladies didn’t know whether to be angry or pleased.  They wanted him to marry, and they wanted his wife to be well-born, no doubt; but to have a mere child set over them!  Well, the marriage took place in London.”

“I was present,” said John.

“The people here said things about it that may have got round to Sir Timothy; but I don’t know.  He never came down to the village, except to church, where he sat away from everybody, in the gallery curtained off.  Anyway, he wouldn’t have the wedding down here.  He invited all her relatives, and none of them had a word to say.  It wasn’t as if she were an heiress.  I believe she had next to nothing.  She was just like a child, laughing, and pleased at getting married, and with all her finery, perhaps,—­or at getting rid of her lessons with the old women may be,—­and the thought of babies of her own.  Who knows what a girl thinks of?” said the doctor, harshly.  “I didn’t see her again for a long time after.  But then I came down; the Brawnton doctor was getting old, and it was a question whether I should succeed him or go on in London, where I was doing well enough.  And—­and I came here,” said the doctor, abruptly.