For some days she went on with her books, but the more she read the more miserable she became, because there was nobody with whom she could interchange what she thought about them.  She was alarmed at last to find that something very much like hatred to her husband was beginning to develop itself.  She was alarmed because she was too much of an Englishwoman to cherish the thought of any desperate remedy, such as separation; and yet the prospect of increasing aversion, which appeared to grow she knew not how, terrified her.  One Monday afternoon she had gone out to her usual haunt in the park, and near the monument she saw somebody whom she presently recognised to be Mr. Armstrong, the vicar of Marston-Cocking, a village about four miles from Cowfold.  She knew him because he had dealt with her husband, and she had met him in the shop.  Marston-Cocking was really nothing better than a hamlet, with a little grey squat church with a little square tower.  Adjoining the churchyard was Mr. Armstrong’s house.  It was not by any means a model parsonage.  It was a very plain affair of red brick with a door in the middle, a window with outside shutters on either side, and one story above.  There was a small garden in front, protected from the road by white palings and a row of laurels.  At the back was a bigger garden, and behind that an orchard.  It had one recommendation, worth to its tenant all the beauty of a moss-covered manse in Devonshire, and that was its openness.  It was on a little sandy hill.  For some unaccountable reason there was a patch of sand in that part of the country, delicious, bright, cheerful yellow and brown sand, lifting itself into little cliffs here and there, pierced with the holes of the sand-martin.  It exhaled no fogs, and was never dull even on a November day, when the clay-lands five miles away breathed a vapour which lay blue and heavy on the furrows, and the miry paths, retaining in their sullenness for weeks the impress of every footmark, almost pulled the boots off the feet as you walked along them.  At Marston, on the contrary, the rain disappeared in an hour; and the landscape always seemed in the depths of winter to retain something of summer sunshine.  The vicarage was open, open to every wind, and from the top rooms the stars could be seen to rise and set, no trees intercepting the view.  Mr. Armstrong was a man of sixty, a widower with no children.  His income from his living was about two hundred pounds annually, and the number of his parishioners all told, men, women, and children, was, as nearly as may be, two hundred.  He had been at Marston-Cocking for thirty-five years.  He came just after his wife died—­how he hardly knew.  The living was offered him; he thought the change would do him good, although he did not intend to remain; but there he had stayed, and there was no chance of his removal.  He was completely out of the world, troubled himself with no church controversies, and preached little