from the main mass, and having brought its dirt with it.  The stretch of road between it and the bridge by which the river was crossed into Dunfield had in its long, hard ugliness something dispiriting.  Though hedges bordered it here and there, they were stunted and grimed; though fields were seen on this side and on that, the grass had absorbed too much mill-smoke to exhibit wholesome verdure; it was fed upon by sheep and cows, seemingly turned in to be out of the way till needed for slaughter, and by the sorriest of superannuated horses.  The land was blighted by the curse of what we name—­using a word as ugly as the thing it represents—­industrialism.

As the cab brought her along this road from Dunfield station, Emily thought of the downs, the woodlands, the fair pastures of Surrey.  There was sorrow at her heart, even a vague tormenting fear.  It would be hard to find solace in Banbrigg.

Hither her parents had come to live when she was thirteen years old, her home having previously been in another and a larger manufacturing town.  Her father was a man marked for ill-fortune:  it pursued him from his entrance into the world, and would inevitably—­you read it in his face—­hunt him into a sad grave.  He was the youngest of a large family; his very birth had been an added misery to a household struggling with want.  His education was of the slightest; at twelve years of age he was already supporting himself, or, one would say, keeping himself above the point of starvation; and at three-and-twenty—­the age when Wilfrid Athel is entering upon life in the joy of freedom—­was ludicrously bankrupt, a petty business he had established being sold up for a debt something short of as many pounds as he had years.  He drifted into indefinite mercantile clerkships, an existence possibly preferable to that of the fourth circle of Inferno, and then seemed at length to have fallen upon a piece of good luck, such as, according to a maxim of pathetic optimism wherewith he was wont to cheer himself, must come to every man sooner or later—­provided he do not die of hunger whilst it is on the way.  He married a schoolmistress, one Miss Martin, who was responsible for the teaching of some twelve or fifteen children of tender age, and who, what was more, owned the house in which she kept school.  The result was that James Hood once more established himself in business, or rather in several businesses, vague, indescribable, save by those who are unhappy enough to understand such matters—­a commission agency, a life insurance agency and a fire insurance ditto, I know not what.  Yet the semblance of prosperity was fleeting.  As if connection with him meant failure, his wife’s school, which she had not abandoned (let us employ negative terms in speaking of this pair), began to fall off; ultimately no school was left.  It did in truth appear that Miss Martin had suffered something in becoming Mrs. Hood.  At her marriage she was five-and-twenty, fairly good-looking,