The Rector did not stay long after her arrival.  He had a distant visit to pay to a dying child, and hurried off so as to be home, if possible, before dark.  Marcella admired him, but did not feel that she understood him more as they were better acquainted.  He was slight and young, and not very clever; but a certain inexpugnable dignity surrounded him, which, real as it was, sometimes irritated Marcella.  It sat oddly on his round face—­boyish still, in spite of its pinched and anxious look—­but there it was, not to be ignored.  Marcella thought him a Conservative, and very backward and ignorant in his political and social opinions.  But she was perfectly conscious that she must also think him a saint; and that the deepest things in him were probably not for her.

Mr. Harden said a few words to her now as to her straw-plaiting scheme, which had his warmest sympathy—­Marcella contrasted his tone gratefully with that of Wharton, and once more fell happily in love with her own ideas—­then he went off, leaving the two girls together.

“Have you seen Mrs. Hurd this morning?” said Mary.

“Yes, Willie seems very bad.”

Mary assented.

“The doctor says he will hardly get through the winter, especially if this weather goes on.  But the greatest excitement of the village just now—­do you know?—­is the quarrel between Hurd and Westall.  Somebody told Charles yesterday that they never meet without threatening each other.  Since the covers at Tudley End were raided, Westall seems to have quite lost his head.  He declares Hurd knew all about that, and that he is hand and glove with the same gang still.  He vows he will catch him out, and Hurd told the man who told Charles that if Westall bullies him any more he will put a knife into him.  And Charles says that Hurd is not a bit like he was.  He used to be such a patient, silent creature.  Now—­”

“He has woke up to a few more ideas and a little more life than he had, that’s all,” said Marcella, impatiently.  “He poached last winter, and small blame to him.  But since he got work at the Court in November—­is it likely?  He knows that he was suspected; and what could be his interest now, after a hard day’s work, to go out again at night, and run the risk of falling into Westall’s clutches, when he doesn’t want either the food or the money?”

“I don’t know,” said Mary, shaking her head.  “Charles says, if they once do it, they hardly ever leave it off altogether.  It’s the excitement and amusement of it.”

“He promised me,” said Marcella, proudly.

“They promise Charles all sorts of things,” said Mary, slyly; “but they don’t keep to them.”

Warmly grateful as both she and the Rector had been from the beginning to Marcella for the passionate interest she took in the place and the people, the sister was sometimes now a trifle jealous—­divinely jealous—­for her brother.  Marcella’s unbounded confidence in her own power and right over Mellor, her growing tendency to ignore anybody else’s right or power, sometimes set Mary aflame, for Charles’s sake, heartily and humbly as she admired her beautiful friend.