ms with her, and he could not forget sometimes in her
presence that he had done some things in his life which he was glad she
did not know.

He had married, early in life, a pretty, commonplace woman, who had
grown thin and querulous in the years that had passed since then, and
who was not at all fitted to be the great lady of Gershom, as the rich
man's wife might have been. That place was filled by Elizabeth, who
filled it well and enjoyed it.

With its large garden and orchard, and its sloping lawn, shaded by trees
beginning to look old and venerable beside those of more recent growth
in the village street, the old square house looked far more like the
great house of the village than the finer mansion lately built by Jacob
further up the hill. Under Elizabeth's direction it had been modernised
and beautified by the throwing out of a bow-window and the addition of a
wide veranda on two sides. Everything about it, without and within,
indicated wealth moderately used, for comfort and not for display. It
was the pleasantest house in the village to visit at, everybody said;
for the squire--so old Mr Holt was generally called--was very
hospitable, and all sorts of people were made welcome there.

There were by this time people in Gershom who had outlived the
remembrance of the days when all the settlers, rich and poor alike, were
socially on a level, and who spoke smoothly and loftily about "station"
and "position" and "the working classes," but the young Holts were not
among them. Elizabeth and Clifton deserved less credit than was given
them on account of their unassuming and agreeable manners with the
village people, for they did not need to assert themselves as some
others did. Miss Elizabeth, for all her unpretending ways, was the
great lady of the village, and liked it, and very likely would have
resented it had a rival appeared to call her right in question.

The Holts of the Hill were, in most respects, very different from the
Holts of the village. They lived and worked and dressed and conducted
themselves generally very much as they had been used to do in the early
days of the settlement. The old man had been long dead, and his widow
and her two daughters lived on the farm. One of the daughters was a
childless widow, Betsey, the other had never married. "A good woman
with an uncertain temper," was the character which many of her friends
would have given her, and some of them might have added that she h