“I wish he’d set his heart on a safer young woman.”

Rhoda’s shudder of revulsion was visible as she put her mouth up to kiss her father’s cheek.

CHAPTER VIII

That is Wrexby Hall, upon the hill between Fenhurst and Wrexby:  the white square mansion, with the lower drawing-room windows one full bow of glass against the sunlight, and great single trees spotting the distant green slopes.  From Queen Anne’s Farm you could read the hour by the stretching of their shadows.  Squire Blancove, who lived there, was an irascible, gouty man, out of humour with his time, and beginning, alas for him! to lose all true faith in his Port, though, to do him justice, he wrestled hard with this great heresy.  His friends perceived the decay in his belief sooner than he did himself.  He was sour in the evening as in the morning.  There was no chirp in him when the bottle went round.  He had never one hour of a humane mood to be reckoned on now.  The day, indeed, is sad when we see the skeleton of the mistress by whom we suffer, but cannot abandon her.  The squire drank, knowing that the issue would be the terrific, curse-begetting twinge in his foot; but, as he said, he was a man who stuck to his habits.  It was over his Port that he had quarrelled with his rector on the subject of hopeful Algernon, and the system he adopted with that young man.  This incident has something to do with Rhoda’s story, for it was the reason why Mrs. Lovell went to Wrexby Church, the spirit of that lady leading her to follow her own impulses, which were mostly in opposition.  So, when perchance she visited the Hall, she chose not to accompany the squire and his subservient guests to Fenhurst, but made a point of going down to the unoccupied Wrexby pew.  She was a beauty, and therefore powerful; otherwise her act of nonconformity would have produced bad blood between her and the squire.

It was enough to have done so in any case; for now, instead of sitting at home comfortably, and reading off the week’s chronicle of sport while he nursed his leg, the unfortunate gentleman had to be up and away to Fenhurst every Sunday morning, or who would have known that the old cause of his general abstention from Sabbath services lay in the detestable doctrine of Wrexby’s rector?

Mrs. Lovell was now at the Hall, and it was Sunday morning after breakfast.  The lady stood like a rival head among the other guests, listening, gloved and bonneted, to the bells of Wrexby, West of the hills, and of Fenhurst, Northeast.  The squire came in to them, groaning over his boots, cross with his fragile wife, and in every mood for satire, except to receive it.

“How difficult it is to be gouty and good!” murmured Mrs. Lovell to the person next her.

“Well,” said the squire, singling out his enemy, “you’re going to that fellow, I suppose, as usual—­eh?”

“Not ‘as usual,’” replied Mrs. Lovell, sweetly; “I wish it were!”