“She says she is married.  We’re bound to accept what she says.”

That was his answer.

“Is she married?” thundered the farmer.  “Has she been and disgraced her mother in her grave?  What am I to think?  She’s my flesh and blood.  Is she—­”

“Oh, hush, father!” Rhoda laid her hand on his arm.  “What doubt can there be of Dahlia?  You have forgotten that she is always truthful.  Come away.  It is shameful to stand here and listen to unmanly things.”

She turned a face of ashes upon Robert.

“Come away, father.  She is our own.  She is my sister.  A doubt of her is an insult to us.”

“But Robert don’t doubt her—­eh?” The farmer was already half distracted from his suspicions.  “Have you any real doubt about the girl, Robert?”

“I don’t trust myself to doubt anybody,” said Robert.

“You don’t cast us off, my boy?”

“I’m a labourer on the farm,” said Robert, and walked away.

“He’s got reason to feel this more ’n the rest of us, poor lad!  It’s a blow to him.”  With which the farmer struck his hand on Rhoda’s shoulder.

“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.