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 matters a very treasure among daughters.  William Carley liked comfort, and liked money still better, and he was quite aware that his daughter was valuable to him, though he was careful not to commit himself by any expression of that opinion.

He knew her value so well that he was jealously averse to the idea of her marrying and leaving him alone at the Grange.  When young Frank Randall, the lawyer’s son, took to calling at the old house very often upon summer evenings, and by various signs and tokens showed himself smitten with Ellen Carley, the bailiff treated the young man so rudely that he was fain to cease from coming altogether, and to content himself with an occasional chance meeting in the lane, when Ellen had business at Crosber, and walked there alone after tea.  He would not have been a particularly good match for any one, being only an articled clerk to his father, whose business in the little market-town of Malsham was by no means extensive; and William Carley spoke of him scornfully as a pauper.  He was a tall good-looking young fellow, however, with a candid pleasant face and an agreeable manner; so Ellen was not a little angry with her father for his rudeness, still more angry with him for his encouragement of her other admirer, a man called Stephen Whitelaw, who lived about a mile from the Grange, and farmed his own land, an estate of some extent for that part of the country.