The village of Kirkham was a sinuous wide street of homesteads and cottages within gardens, and having a green open border to the road where geese and pigs, cows and children, pastured indiscriminately.  It was the old order of things where one man was master.  The gardens had, for the most part, a fine show of fragrant flowers, the hedges were neatly trimmed, the fruit trees were ripening abundantly.  Of children, fat and ruddy, clean and well clothed, there were many playing about, for their mothers were gone to Norminster market, and there was no school on Saturday.  Bessie spoke to nobody, and nobody spoke to her.  Some of the children dropt her a curtsey, but the majority only stared at her as a stranger.  She felt, somehow, as if she would never be anything else but a stranger here.  When she had passed through the village to the end of it, where the “Chequers,” the forge, and the wheelwright’s shed stood, she came to a wide common.  Looking across it, she saw the river, and found her way home by the mill and the harvest-fields.

It would have enhanced Bessie’s pleasure, though not her happiness perhaps, if she could have betaken herself to building castles in the Woldshire air, but the moment she began to indulge in reverie her thoughts flew to the Forest.  No glamour of pride, enthusiasm, or any sort of delightful hope mistified her imagination as to her real indifference towards Abbotsmead.  When she reached the garden she sat down amongst the roses, and gazed at the beautiful old flower-woven walls that she had admired yesterday, and felt like a visitor growing weary of the place.  Even while her bodily eyes were upon it, her mind’s eye was filled with a vision of the green slopes of the wilderness garden at Brook, and the beeches laving their shadows in the sweet running water.

“I believe I am homesick,” she said.  “I cannot care for this place.  I should have had a better chance of taking to it kindly if my grandfather had let me go home for a little while.  Everything is an effort here.”  And it is to be feared that she gave way again, and fretted in a manner that Madame Fournier would have grieved to see.  But there was no help for it; her heart was sore, and tears relieved it.

* * * * *

Mr. Fairfax was at home to dinner.  He returned from Norminster jaded and out of spirits.  Now, Bessie, though she did not love him (though she felt it a duty to assert and reassert that fact to herself, lest she should forget it), felt oddly pained when she looked into his face and saw that he was dull; to be dull signified to be unhappy in Bessie’s vocabulary.  But timidity tied her tongue.  It was not until Jonquil had left them to themselves that they attempted any conversation.  Then Mr. Fairfax remarked, “You have been making a tour of investigation, Elizabeth:  you have been into the village?”

Bessie said that she had, and that she had gone into the church.  Then all at once an impulse came upon her to ask, “Why did you let my parents go so far away? was it so very wrong in them to marry?”