Meantime Mr. D——­, having carelessly nodded, had gone on.  Half a mile farther some of his own fields were contiguous to the road, yet he did not, after the fashion of the farmer generally, pause to gaze at them searchingly; he went on with the same careless glance.  This fact, which the old-fashioned folk had often observed, troubled them greatly.  It seemed so unnatural, so opposite to the old ideas and ways, that a man should take no apparent interest in his own farm.  They said that Frank was nothing of a farmer; he knew nothing of farming.  They looked at his ricks; they were badly built, and still worse thatched.  They examined his meadows, and saw wisps of hay lying about, evidence of neglect; the fields had not been properly raked.  His ploughed fields were full of weeds, and not half worked enough.  His labourers had acquired a happy-go-lucky style, and did their work anyhow or not at all, having no one to look after them.  So, clearly, it was not Frank’s good farming that made him so rich, and enabled him to take so high and leading a position.

Nor was it his education or his ‘company’ manners.  The old folk noted his boorishness and lack of the little refinements which mark the gentleman.  His very voice was rude and hoarse, and seemed either to grumble or to roar forth his meaning.  They had frequently heard him speak in public—­he was generally on the platform when any local movement was in progress—­and could not understand why he was put up there to address the audience, unless it was for his infinite brass.  The language he employed was rude, his sentences disjointed, his meaning incoherent; but he had a knack of an apropos jest, not always altogether savoury, but which made a mixed assembly laugh.  As his public speeches did not seem very brilliant, they supposed he must have the gift of persuasion, in private.  He did not even ride well to hounds—­an accomplishment that has proved a passport to a great landlord’s favour before now—­for he had an awkward, and, to the eye, not too secure a seat in the saddle.

Nor was it his personal appearance.  He was very tall and ungainly, with a long neck and a small round head on the top of it.  His features were flat, and the skin much wrinkled; there seemed nothing in his countenance to recommend him to the notice of the other sex.  Yet he had been twice married; the last time to a comparatively young lady with some money, who dressed in the height of fashion.

Frank had two families—­one, grown up, by his first wife, the second in the nursery—­but it made no difference to him.  All were well dressed and well educated; the nursery maids and the infants went out for their airings in a carriage and pair.  Mrs. D——­, gay as a Parisian belle, and not without pretensions to beauty, was seen at balls, parties, and every other social amusement.  She seemed to have the entree everywhere in the county.  All this greatly upset and troubled the old folk, whose heads Frank looked over as he carelessly nodded them good-morning driving by.  The cottage people from whose ranks his family had so lately risen, however, had a very decided opinion upon the subject, and expressed it forcibly. “’Pend upon it,” they said, “’pend upon it, he have zucked zumbody in zumhow.”