If Ellen Whitelaw’s life had been as the lives of happier women, full of small daily cares and all-engrossing domestic interests, the memory of that unearthly scream would no doubt have faded out of her mind ere long, instead of remaining, as it did, a source of constant perplexity to her.  But there was no interest, no single charm in her life.  There was nothing in the world left for her to care for.  The fertile flats around Wyncomb Farmhouse bounded her universe.  Day by day she rose to perform the same monotonous duties, sustained by no lofty aim, cheered by neither friendship nor affection; for she could not teach herself to feel anything warmer than toleration for her daily companion, Mrs. Tadman—­only working laboriously because existence was more endurable to her when she was busy than when she was idle.  It was scarcely strange, then, that she brooded upon the memory of that night when the nameless stranger had come to Wyncomb, and that she tried to put the fact of his coming and that other incident of the cry together, and to make something out of the two events by that means; but put them together as she might, she was no nearer any solution of the mystery.  That her husband and the stranger could have failed to hear that piercing shriek seemed almost impossible:  yet both had denied hearing it.  The story of the stranger having knocked his shin and cried out on doing so, appeared like a feeble attempt to account for that wild cry.  Vain and hopeless were all her endeavours to arrive at any reasonable explanation, and her attempts to get anything like an opinion out of Mrs. Tadman were utterly useless.  Mr. Whitelaw’s cousin was still inclined to take a gloomy view of the stranger’s visit, in spite of her kinsman’s assurance that the transaction between himself and the unknown was a profitable one.  Horse-racing—­if not parting with a farm—­Mrs. Tadman opined was at the bottom of the business; and when did horse-racing ever fail to lead to ruin sooner or later?  It was only a question of time.  Ellen sighed, remembering how her father had squandered his employer’s money on the race-course, and how, for that folly of his, she had been doomed to become Stephen Whitelaw’s wife.  But there did not seem to her to be anything of the horsey element in her husband’s composition.  He was never away from home, except to attend to his business at market; and she had never seen him spelling over the sporting-papers, as her father had been wont to do, night after night, with a perplexed brow and an anxious face, making calculations upon the margin of the print every now and then with a stump of lead pencil, and chewing the end of it meditatively in the intervals of his lection.