Clemence thanked her languidly, said her friends would probably have some waiting for her when she arrived, and bidding her good evening, passed out of the gate, and the slight form was soon lost to view in the deepening shadows of the night.

The young teacher’s forebodings were soon to be realized.  She was right.  She had made an enemy of Mr. Owen, and he determined to make her feel it henceforward, by every means in his power.  In his petty way, he was as particular about keeping up an outside appearance of respectability, as any aristocratic member of a rich city church might be to cover up their own glaring deficiencies.  It would have ruined him as completely in his little circle, to have been found out in his underhand tricks, as though he had been of the consequence in other people’s estimation that he was in his own.  He had never, in all his life, been accustomed to mingle with but one class of women, and that the ignorant, ill-bred gossip-mongers of his own village.  Consequently, he was in momentary fear of having his recent escapade brought to light, and becoming the laughing stock of the place, for having fallen in love with, and been snubbed by the pretty young school mistress.

He was possessed of a sufficient share of low cunning to enable him, finally, to hit upon a plan by which he hoped this catastrophe might be averted.  There upon he proceeded to unfold to the astonished partner of his joys and sorrows, that he was glad Miss Graystone had left the house, for he considered her a dangerous person to enter any family circle; that she had sought, with great assiduity, while she had been an inmate of his house, to bring misery and disgrace beneath that peaceful roof, by beguiling away the affections of the fond husband and father, and that, like a second Joseph, he had come through the trial manfully.  This was enough, and more than enough, for a woman like the one who listened in open-mouthed wonder to every word.

Before a week rolled away, every one knew the story of Farmer Owen’s struggles and triumph.  Not that any one, even to his own injured wife, for a moment, believed the assertion.  Not she.  Even with her obtuse intellect, she was a woman, and consequently her wits were too sharp to allow her to be imposed upon by that palpable fiction.  She knew, as well as she wanted to, that her dear Amos had been indignantly put in his place by Clemence, if he had made the slightest impudent advance.

She knew, too, by intuition, that even had Clemence been of the class her husband, governed by his malevolent feelings, wished to have her appear, she would look higher than these boorish, homespun farmers.  In short, she fully realized that the girl despised her husband so utterly that she barely treated him with politeness.

But all this did not affect her in regard to the feeling she had for Clemence now, and only a woman can understand how the knowledge of the girl’s innocence only made her hate her the more.  She knew that her husband was considered too much an object of contempt to be feared at all in regard to what he could either say or do.