The marriage of the season, with all its accompanying festivities and jubilations, had not been put off for seven weeks—­till after Easter—­without arousing a storm of critical astonishment both in village and county.  And when the reason was known—­that it was because Miss Boyce had taken the Disley murder so desperately to heart, that until the whole affair was over, and the men either executed or reprieved, she could spare no thought to wedding clothes or cates—­there was curiously little sympathy with Marcella.  Most of her own class thought it a piece of posing, if they did not say so as frankly as Miss Raeburn—­something done for self-advertisement and to advance anti-social opinions; while the Mellor cottagers, with the instinctive English recoil from any touch of sentiment not, so to speak, in the bargain, gossiped and joked about it freely.

“She can’t be very fond o’ ’im, not of Muster Raeburn, she can’t,” said old Patton, delivering himself as he sat leaning on his stick at his open door, while his wife and another woman or two chattered inside. “Not what I’d call lover-y.  She don’t want to run in harness, she don’t, no sooner than, she need.  She’s a peert filly is Miss Boyce.”

“I’ve been a-waitin’, an’ a-waitin’,” said his wife, with her gentle sigh, “to hear summat o’ that new straw-plaitin’ she talk about.  But nary a word.  They do say as it’s give up althegither.”

“No, she’s took up wi’ nursin’ Minta Hurd—­wonderful took up,” said another woman.  “They do say as Ann Mullins can’t abear her.  When she’s there nobody can open their mouth.  When that kind o’ thing happens in the fambly it’s bad enoof without havin’ a lady trailin’ about you all day long, so that you have to be mindin’ yersel’, an’ thinkin’ about givin’ her a cheer, an’ the like.”

One day in the dusk, more than a fortnight after the inquest, Marcella, coming from the Hurds’ cottage, overtook Mrs. Jellison, who was going home after spending the afternoon with her daughter.

Hitherto Marcella had held aloof from Isabella Westall and her relations, mainly, to do her justice, from fear lest she might somehow hurt or offend them.  She had been to see Charlie Dynes’s mother, but she had only brought herself to send a message of sympathy through Mary Harden to the keeper’s widow.

Mrs. Jellison looked at her askance with her old wild eyes as Marcella came up with her.

“Oh, she’s puddlin’ along,” she said in answer to Marcella’s inquiry, using a word very familiar in the village.  “She’ll not do herself a mischief while there’s Nurse Ellen an’ me to watch her like a pair o’ cats.  She’s dreadful upset, is Isabella—­shouldn’t ha’ thought it of her.  That fust day”—­a cloud darkened the curious, dreamy face—­“no, I’m not a-goin’ to think about that fust day, I’m not, ‘tain’t a ha’porth o’ good,” she added resolutely; “but she was all right when they’d let her get ’im ‘ome, and wash an’ settle ‘im, an’ put ’im comfortable like in his coffin.  He wor a big man, miss, when he wor laid out!  Searle, as made the coffin, told her as ee ’adn’t made one such an extry size since old Harry Flood, the blacksmith, fifteen year ago.  Ee’d soon a done for Jim Hurd if it ‘ad been fists o’ both sides.  But guns is things as yer can’t reckon on.”.