There was to be no honeymoon trip.  Stephen Whitelaw did not understand the philosophy of running away from a comfortable home to spend money in furnished lodgings; and he had said as much, when the officious Tadman suggested a run to Weymouth, or Bournemouth, or a fortnight in the Isle of Wight.  To Ellen it was all the same where the rest of her life should be spent.  It could not be otherwise than wretched henceforward, and the scene of her misery mattered nothing.  So she uttered no complaint because her husband brought her straight home to Wyncomb Farmhouse, and her wedded life began in that dreary dwelling-place.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

A DOMESTIC MYSTERY.

It was near the end of March, but still bleak cold weather.  Ellen Carley had been married something less than a fortnight, and had come to look upon the dismal old farm-house by the river with a more accustomed eye than when Mrs. Tadman had taken her from room to room on a journey of inspection.  Not that the place seemed any less dreary and ugly to her to-day than it had seemed at the very first.  Familiarity could not make it pleasant.  She hated the house and everything about and around it, as she hated her husband, with a rooted aversion, not to be subdued by any endeavour which she might make now and then—­and she did honestly make such endeavour—­to arrive at a more Christian-like frame of mind.

Notwithstanding this deeply-seated instinctive dislike to all her surroundings, she endured her fate quietly, and did her duty with a patient spirit which might fairly be accepted as an atonement for those inward rebellious feelings which she could not conquer.  Having submitted to be the scapegoat of her father’s sin, she bore her burden very calmly, and fulfilled the sacrifice without any outward mark of martyrdom.

She went about the work of the farm-house with a resolute active air that puzzled Mrs. Tadman, who had fully expected the young wife would play the fine lady, and leave all the drudgery of the household to her.  But it really seemed as if Ellen liked hard work.  She went from one task to another with an indefatigable industry, an energy that never gave way.  Only when the day’s work in house and dairy was done did her depression of spirits become visible.  Then, indeed, when all was finished, and she sat down, neatly dressed for the afternoon, in the parlour with Mrs. Tadman, it was easy to see how utterly hopeless and miserable this young wife was.  The pale fixed face, the listless hands clasped loosely in her lap, every attitude of the drooping figure, betrayed the joyless spirit, the broken heart.  At these times, when they were alone together, waiting Stephen Whitelaw’s coming home to tea, Mrs. Tadman’s heart, not entirely hardened by long years of self-seeking, yearned towards her kinsman’s wife; and the secret animosity with which she had at first regarded her changed to a silent pity, a compassion she would fain have expressed in some form or other, had she dared.