For Mrs. Hurd, in her anxiety, was whispering in old Patton’s ear that it might be well for him to give up her one wooden arm-chair, in which he was established, to Miss Boyce.  But he, being old, deaf, and rheumatic, was slow to move, and Marcella’s peremptory gesture bade her leave him in peace.

“Well, it’s you that’s the young ’un, ain’t it, miss?” said Mrs. Jellison, cheerfully.  “Poor old Patton, he do get slow on his legs, don’t you, Patton?  But there, there’s no helping it when you’re turned of eighty.”

And she turned upon him a bright, philosophic eye, being herself a young thing not much over seventy, and energetic accordingly.  Mrs. Jellison passed for the village wit, and was at least talkative and excitable beyond her fellows.

“Well, you don’t seem to mind getting old, Mrs. Jellison,” said Marcella, smiling at her.

The eyes of all the old people round their tea-table were by now drawn irresistibly to Miss Boyce in the chimney corner, to her slim grace, and the splendour of her large black hat and feathers.  The new squire’s daughter had so far taken them by surprise.  Some of them, however, were by now in the second stage of critical observation—­none the less critical because furtive and inarticulate.

“Ah?” said Mrs. Jellison, interrogatively, with a high, long-drawn note peculiar to her.  “Well, I’ve never found you get forrarder wi’ snarlin’ over what you can’t help.  And there’s mercies.  When you’ve had a husband in his bed for fower year, miss, and he’s took at last, you’ll know.”

She nodded emphatically.  Marcella laughed.

“I know you were very fond of him, Mrs. Jellison, and looked after him very well, too.”

“Oh, I don’t say nothin’ about that,” said Mrs. Jellison, hastily.  “But all the same you kin reckon it up, and see for yoursen.  Fower year—­an’ fire upstairs, an’ fire downstairs, an’ fire all night, an’ soomthin’ allus wanted.  An’ he such an objeck afore he died!  It do seem like a holiday now to sit a bit.”

And she crossed her hands on her lap with a long breath of content.  A lock of grey hair had escaped from her bonnet, across her wrinkled forehead, and gave her a half-careless rakish air.  Her youth of long ago—­a youth of mad spirits, and of an extraordinary capacity for physical enjoyment, seemed at times to pierce to the surface again, even through her load of years.  But in general she had a dreamy, sunny look, as of one fed with humorous fancies, but disinclined often to the trouble of communicating them.

“Well, I missed my daughter, I kin tell you,” said Mrs. Brunt, with a sigh, “though she took a deal more lookin’ after nor your good man, Mrs. Jellison.”

Mrs. Brunt was a gentle, pretty old woman, who lived in another of the village almshouses, next door to the Pattons, and was always ready to help her neighbours in their domestic toils.  Her last remaining daughter, the victim of a horrible spinal disease, had died some nine or ten months before the Boyces arrived at Mellor.  Marcella had already heard the story several times, but it was part of her social gift that she was a good listener to such things even at the twentieth hearing.