She stopped abruptly in her walk and stood still.  The hand holding her package was quite cold.  This was what one must not allow one’s self.  But how the thoughts had raced through her brain!  She turned and hastened her steps towards Mrs. Welden’s cottage.

In Mrs. Welden’s tiny back yard there stood a “coal lodge” suited to the size of the domicile and already stacked with a full winter’s supply of coal.  Therefore the well-polished and cleanly little grate in the living-room was bright with fire.

Old Doby, who had tottered round the corner to pay his fellow gossip a visit, was sitting by it, and old Mrs. Welden, clean as to cap and apron and small purple shoulder shawl, had evidently been allaying his natural anxiety as to the conduct of foreign sovereigns by reading in a loud voice the “print” under the pictures in an illustrated paper.

This occupation had, however, been interrupted a few moments before Miss Vanderpoel’s arrival.  Mrs. Bester, the neighbour in the next cottage, had stepped in with her youngest on her hip and was talking breathlessly.  She paused to drop her curtsy as Betty entered, and old Doby stood up and made his salute with a trembling hand,

“She’ll know,” he said.  “Gentry knows the ins an’ outs of gentry fust.  She’ll know the rights.”

“What has happened?”

Mrs. Bester unexpectedly burst into tears.  There was an element in the female villagers’ temperament which Betty had found was frequently unexpected in its breaking forth.

“He’s down, miss,” she said.  “He’s down with it crool bad.  There’ll be no savin’ of him—­none.”

Betty laid her package of sewing cotton and knitting wool quietly on the blue and white checked tablecloth.

“Who—­is he?” she asked.

“His lordship—­and him just saved all Dunstan parish from death—­to go like this!”

In Stornham village and in all others of the neighbourhood the feminine attitude towards Mount Dunstan had been one of strongly emotional admiration.  The thwarted female longing for romance—­the desire for drama and a hero had been fed by him.  A fine, big young man, one that had been “spoke ill of” and regarded as an outcast, had suddenly turned the tables on fortune and made himself the central figure of the county, the talk of gentry in their grand houses, of cottage women on their doorsteps, and labourers stopping to speak to each other by the roadside.  Magic stories had been told of him, beflowered with dramatic detail.  No incident could have been related to his credit which would not have been believed and improved upon.  Shut up in his village working among his people and unseen by outsiders, he had become a popular idol.  Any scrap of news of him—­any rumour, true or untrue, was seized upon and excitedly spread abroad.  Therefore Mrs. Bester wept as she talked, and, if the truth must be told, enjoyed the situation.  She was the first to tell the story to her ladyship’s sister herself, as well as to Mrs. Welden and old Doby.