In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model.  There came once to Squire Blancove’s unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair lady.  They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow, Mrs. Lovell by name.  They looked at her all through the service, and the lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut her eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of herself, as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of grey-shot silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and the picture she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many ensuing years.

Mrs. Fleming fought her battle with a heart worthy of her countrywomen, and with as much success as the burden of a despondent husband would allow to her.  William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer, for whom the wheels of the world went too fast:—­a big man, appearing to be difficult to kill, though deeply smitten.  His cheeks bloomed in spite of lines and stains, and his large, quietly dilated, brown ox-eyes, that never gave out a meaning, seldom showed as if they had taken one from what they saw.  Until his wife was lost to him, he believed that he had a mighty grievance against her; but as he was not wordy, and was by nature kind, it was her comfort to die and not to know it.  This grievance was rooted in the idea that she was ruinously extravagant.  The sight of the plentiful table was sore to him; the hungry mouths, though he grudged to his offspring nothing that he could pay for, were an afflicting prospect.  “Plump ’em up, and make ’em dainty,” he advanced in contravention of his wife’s talk of bread and beef.

But he did not complain.  If it came to an argument, the farmer sidled into a secure corner of prophecy, and bade his wife to see what would come of having dainty children.  He could not deny that bread and beef made blood, and were cheaper than the port-wine which doctors were in the habit of ordering for this and that delicate person in the neighbourhood; so he was compelled to have recourse to secret discontent.  The attention, the time, and the trifles of money shed upon the flower garden, were hardships easier to bear.  He liked flowers, and he liked to hear the praise of his wife’s horticultural skill.  The garden was a distinguishing thing to the farm, and when on a Sunday he walked home from church among full June roses, he felt the odour of them to be so like his imagined sensations of prosperity, that the deception was worth its cost.  Yet the garden in its bloom revived a cruel blow.  His wife had once wounded his vanity.  The massed vanity of a silent man, when it does take a wound, desires a giant’s vengeance; but as one can scarcely seek to enjoy that monstrous gratification when one’s wife is the offender, the farmer escaped from his