ued her with
a rancorous hostility against all the world. For she was a very proud
woman, independent, holding her head high, so folks said, like a Garstin
bred and born; and Anthony, although some reckoned him quiet and of
little account, came to take after her as he grew into manhood.

She took into her own hands the management of the Hootsey farm, and set
the boy to work for her along with the two farm servants. It was
twenty-five years now since his uncle Jake's death: there were grey
hairs in his sandy beard; but he still worked for his mother, as he had
done when a growing lad.

And now that times were grown to be bad (of late years the price of
stock had been steadily falling; and the hay harvests had drifted from
bad to worse) the widow Garstin no longer kept any labouring men; but
lived, she and her son, year in and year out, in a close parsimonious
way.

That had been Anthony Garstin's life--a dull, eventless sort of
business, the sluggish incrustation of monotonous years. And until Rosa
Blencarn had come to keep house for her uncle, he had never thought
twice on a woman's face.

The Garstins had always been good church-goers, and Anthony, for years,
had acted as churchwarden. It was one summer evening, up at the
vicarage, whilst he was checking the offertory account, that he first
set eyes upon her. She was fresh back from school at Leeds: she was
dressed in a white dress: she looked, he thought, like a London lady.

She stood by the window, tall and straight and queenly, dreamily gazing
out into the summer twilight, whilst he and her uncle sat over their
business. When he rose to go, she glanced at him with quick curiosity;
he hurried away, muttering a sheepish good night.

The next time that he saw her was in church on Sunday. He watched her
shyly, with a hesitating, reverential discretion: her beauty seemed to
him wonderful, distant, enigmatic. In the afternoon, young Mrs. Forsyth,
from Longscale, dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother, and the two
set off gossiping of Rosa Blencarn, speaking of her freely, in tones of
acrimonious contempt. For a long while he sat silent, puffing at his
pipe; but at last, when his mother concluded with, 'She looks t' me fair
stuck-oop, full o' toonish airs an' graces,' despite himself, he burst
out: 'Ye're jest wastin' yer breath wi' that cackle. I reckon Miss
Blencarn's o' a different clay to us folks.' Young Mrs. Forsyth tittered
immoderately, and the next we