ushes, where the
water-fowl fluttered and screamed: all around, a vast meadow which
might be called a park, bordered by an old plantation and guarded by
stone ledges which looked like little prisons. Outside the gate the
country, once entirely rural and lovely, now black with coal mines, was
chiefly peopled by men and brethren with candles stuck in their hats,
and with a diabolic complexion which laid them peculiarly open to
suspicion in the eyes of the children at Gadsmere--Mrs. Glasher's four
beautiful children, who had dwelt there for about three years. Now, in
November, when the flower-beds were empty, the trees leafless, and the
pool blackly shivering, one might have said that the place was sombrely
in keeping with the black roads and black mounds which seemed to put
the district in mourning;--except when the children were playing on the
gravel with the dogs for their companions. But Mrs. Glasher, under her
present circumstances, liked Gadsmere as well as she would have liked
any other abode. The complete seclusion of the place, which the
unattractiveness of the country secured, was exactly to her taste. When
she drove her two ponies with a waggonet full of children, there were
no gentry in carriages to be met, only men of business in gigs; at
church there were no eyes she cared to avoid, for the curate's wife and
the curate himself were either ignorant of anything to her
disadvantage, or ignored it: to them she was simply a widow lady, the
tenant of Gadsmere; and the name of Grandcourt was of little interest
in that district compared with the names of Fletcher and Gawcome, the
lessees of the collieries.

It was full ten years since the elopement of an Irish officer's
beautiful wife with young Grandcourt, and a consequent duel where the
bullets wounded the air only, had made some little noise. Most of those
who remembered the affair now wondered what had become of that Mrs.
Glasher, whose beauty and brilliancy had made her rather conspicuous to
them in foreign places, where she was known to be living with young
Grandcourt.

That he should have disentangled himself from that connection seemed
only natural and desirable. As to her, it was thought that a woman who
was understood to have forsaken her child along with her husband had
probably sunk lower. Grandcourt had of course got weary of her. He was
much given to the pursuit of women: but a man in his position would by
this time desire to make a suitable marriage