That Christmas-day came to an end at last, after a long evening in the oak parlour enlivened by a solemn game at whist and a ponderous supper of cold sirloin and mince pies; and looking out at the wintry moonlight, and the shadowy garden and flat waste of farm-land from the narrow casement in her own room.  Ellen Carley wondered what those she loved best in the world were doing and thinking of under that moonlit sky.  Where was Marian Holbrook, that new-found friend whom she had loved so well, and whose fate remained so profound a mystery? and what was Frank Randall doing, far away in London, where he had gone to fill a responsible position in a large City firm of solicitors, and whence he had promised to return faithful to his first love, as soon as he found himself fairly on the road to a competence wherewith to endow her?

Thus it was that poor Ellen kept the close of her Christmas-day, looking out over the cold moonlit fields, and wondering how she was to escape from the persecution of Stephen Whitelaw.

That obnoxious individual had invited Mr. Carley and his daughter to spend New-year’s-day at Wyncomb; a display of hospitality so foreign to his character, that it was scarcely strange that Mrs. Tadman opened her eyes and stared aghast as she heard the invitation given.  It had been accepted too, much to Ellen’s disgust; and her father told her more than once in the course of the ensuing week that she was to put on her best gown, and smarten herself up a bit, on New-year’s-day.

“And if you want a new gown, Nell, I don’t mind giving it you,” said the bailiff, in a burst of generosity, and with the prevailing masculine idea that a new gown was a panacea for all feminine griefs.  “You can walk over to Malsham and buy it any afternoon you like.”

But Ellen did not care for a new gown, and told her father so, with a word or two of thanks for his offer.  She did not desire fine dresses; she had indeed been looking over and furbishing up her wardrobe of late, with a view to that possible flight of hers, and it was to her cotton working gowns that she had paid most attention:  looking forward to begin a harder life in some stranger’s service—­ready to endure anything rather than to marry Stephen Whitelaw.  And of late the conviction had grown upon her that her father was very much in earnest, and that before long it would be a question whether she should obey him, or be turned out of doors.  She had seen his dealings with other people, and she knew him to be a passionate determined man, hard as iron in his anger.

“I won’t give him the trouble to turn me out of doors,” Ellen said to herself.  “When I know his mind, and that there’s no hope of turning him, I’ll get away quietly, and find some new home.  He has no real power over me, and I have but to earn my own living to be independent of him.  And I don’t suppose Frank will think any the worse of me for having been a servant,” thought the girl, with something like a sob.  It seemed hard that she must needs sink lower in her lover’s eyes, when she was so far beneath him already; he a lawyer’s son, a gentleman by education, and she an untaught country girl.