At family prayers next morning (the service was conducted by Mrs. Malory) the Vidame appeared with a white rosebud in his buttonhole, Mrs. Brown-Smith wearing its twin sister.  He took her to the stream in the park where she fished, Matilda following in a drooping manner.  The Vidame was much occupied in extracting the flies from the hair of Mrs. Brown-Smith, in which they were frequently entangled.  After luncheon he drove with the two ladies and Mrs. Malory to the country town, the usual resource of ladies in the country, and though he sat next Matilda, Mrs. Brown-Smith was beaming opposite, and the pair did most of the talking.  While Mrs. Malory and her daughter shopped, it was the Vidame who took Mrs. Brown-Smith to inspect the ruins of the Abbey.  The county neighbours had left in the morning, a new set arrived, and while Matilda had to entertain them, it was Mrs Brown-Smith whom the Vidame entertained.

This kind of thing went on; when Matilda was visiting her cottagers it was the Vidame and Mrs. Brown-Smith whom visitors flushed in window seats.  They wondered that Mrs. Malory had asked so dangerous a woman to the house:  they marvelled that she seemed quite radiant and devoted to her lively visitor.  There was a school feast:  it was the Vidame who arranged hurdle-races for children of both sexes (so improper!), and who started the competitors.

Meanwhile Mrs. Malory, so unusually genial in public, held frequent conventicles with Matilda in private.  But Matilda declined to be jealous; they were only old friends, she said, these flagitious two; Dear Anne (that was the Vidame’s Christian name) was all that she could wish.

‘You know the place is so dull, mother,’ the brave girl said.  ’Even grandmamma, who was a saint, says so in her Domestic Outpourings’ (religious memoirs privately printed in 1838).  ’We cannot amuse Mrs. Brown-Smith, and it is so kind and chivalrous of Anne.’

‘To neglect you?’

‘No, to do duty for Tom and Dick,’ who were her brothers, and who would not greatly have entertained the fair visitor had they been present.

Matilda was the kind of woman whom we all adore as represented in the characters of Fielding’s Amelia and Sophia.  Such she was, so gracious and yielding, in her overt demeanour, but, alas, poor Matilda’s pillow was often wet with her tears.  She was loyal; she would not believe evil:  she crushed her natural jealousy ’as a vice of blood, upon the threshold of the mind.’

Mrs. Brown-Smith was nearly as unhappy as the girl.  The more she hated the Vidame—­and she detested him more deeply every day—­the more her heart bled for Matilda.  Mrs. Brown-Smith also had her secret conferences with Mrs. Malory.

‘Nothing will shake her belief in that man,’ said Mrs. Malory.

‘Your daughter is the best girl I ever met,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith.  ’The best tempered, the least suspicious, the most loyal.  And I am doing my worst to make her hate me.  Oh, I can’t go on!’ Here Mrs. Brown-Smith very greatly surprised her hostess by bursting into tears.