This old sinner—­Priest Wilson as he was called—­and Miss Gryce of Windy Brow represented the wealth and intellect of a place which was at the back of everything, out of the highway of life and untouched by the progress of history or science.  And the one was not very much superior to the other save in moral cleanliness; which, however, counts for something.

If North Aston had said with a sniff that Mr. Gryce was not thoroughbred, what would have been its verdict on Sister Keziah?  He at least had rubbed off some of the native fell-side mould by rolling about foreign parts, gathering experience if not moss, and becoming rich in knowledge if not in guineas; but Keziah, who had spent the last twenty years of her life in close attendance on a paralytic old mother, had stiffened as she stood, and the local mould encrusting her was very thick.  Nevertheless, she too had a good heart if a rough hand, and, though eccentric almost to insanity, as one so often finds with people living out of the line and influence of public opinion, yet was as sound at the core as she was rude and odd in the husk.

She was a small woman, lean, wrinkled, and with a curious mixture of primness and slovenliness in her dress.  She wore a false front, which she called a topknot, the small, crimped, deep-brown mohair curls of which were bound about her forehead with a bit of black velvet ribbon, while gray hairs straggled from underneath to make the patent sham more transparent still; and over her topknot she wore a rusty black cap that enclosed the keen monkeyish face like a ruff.  Her every-day gown was one of coarse brown camlet, any number of years old, darned and patched till it was like a Joseph’s coat; and the Rob Roy tartan shawl which she pinned across her bosom hid a state of dilapidation which even she did not care should be seen.  She wore a black stuff apron full of fine tones from fruit-stains and fire-scorchings; and she took snuff.

She was reputed to be worth a mort of money, and she had saved a goodly sum.  It would have been more had she had the courage to invest it; but she had a profound distrust of all financial speculations—­had not Emmanuel lost his share by playing at knucklebones with it in the City?—­and she was not the fool to follow my leader into the mire.  For her part, she put her trust in teapots and stockings, with richer hoards wrapped in rags and sewn up in the mattress, and here a few odd pounds under the rice and there a few hidden in the coffee.  That was her idea of a banking account, and she held it to be the best there was.

“Don’t lend your hat,” she used to say, “and then you’ll not have to go bareheaded.”  And sometimes, talking of loans on securities, she would take a pinch of snuff and say she “reckoned nowt of that man who locked his own granary door and gave another man the key.”