Her father looked at her with a grim kind of approval.

“You’ll do well enough, lass,” he said; “but I should like you to have had something smarter than that blue stuff.  I wouldn’t have minded a couple of pounds or so to buy you a silk gown.  But you’ll be able to buy yourself as many silk gowns as ever you like by-and-by, if you play your cards well and don’t make a fool of yourself.”

Ellen knew what he meant well enough, but did not care to take any notice of the speech.  The time would soon come, no doubt, when she must take her stand in direct opposition to him, and in the meanwhile it would be worse than foolish to waste breath in idle squabbling.

They were to drive to Wyncomb in the bailiff’s gig; rather an obsolete vehicle, with a yellow body, a mouldy leather apron, and high wheels picked out with red, drawn by a tall gray horse that did duty with the plough on ordinary occasions.  Stephen Whitelaw’s house was within an easy walk of the Grange; but the gig was a more dignified mode of approach than a walk, and the bailiff insisted on driving his daughter to her suitor’s abode in that conveyance.

Wyncomb was a long low gray stone house, of an unknown age; a spacious habitation enough, with many rooms, and no less than three staircases, but possessing no traces of that fallen grandeur which pervaded the Grange.  It had been nothing better than a farm-house from time immemorial, and had been added to and extended and altered to suit the convenience of successive generations of farmers.  It was a gloomy-looking house at all times, Ellen Carley thought, but especially gloomy under that leaden winter sky; a house which it would have been almost impossible to associate with pleasant family gatherings or the joyous voices of young children; a grim desolate-looking house, that seemed to freeze the passing traveller with its cold blank stare, as if its gloomy portal had a voice to say to him, “However lost you may be for lack of shelter, however weary for want of rest, come not here!”

Idle fancies, perhaps; but they were the thoughts with which Wyncomb Farmhouse always inspired Ellen Carley.

“The place just suits its master’s hard miserly nature,” she said.  “One would think it had been made on purpose for him; or perhaps the Whitelaws have been like that from generation to generation.”

There was no such useless adornment as a flower-garden at Wyncomb.  Stephen Whitelaw cared about as much for roses and lilies as he cared for Greek poetry or Beethoven’s sonatas.  At the back of the house there was a great patch of bare shadowless ground devoted to cabbages and potatoes, with a straggling border of savoury herbs; a patch not even divided from the farm land beyond, but melting imperceptibly into a field of mangel-wurzel.  There were no superfluous hedges upon Mr. Whitelaw’s dominions; not a solitary tree to give shelter to the tired cattle in the long hot summer days.  Noble old oaks and patriarch beeches, tall sycamores and grand flowering chestnuts, had been stubbed up remorselessly by that economical agriculturist; and he was now the proud possessor of one of the ugliest and most profitable farms in Hampshire.