tly, with her hand on Stephen Whitelaw's arm. She had a faint
consciousness of some ceremony in the vestry, where it had taken Stephen
a long time to sign his name in the register, and where the clergyman had
congratulated him upon his good fortune in having won for himself such a
pretty young wife; but it was all more or less like a dreadful
oppressive dream. Mr. Whitelaw's chaise-cart was waiting for them; and
they all four got in, and drove at once to Wyncomb; where there was
another ponderous dinner, very much like the banquet of new-year's-day,
and where the bailiff drank freely, after his wont, and grew somewhat
uproarious towards tea-time, though Mr. Whitelaw's selections of port and
sherry were not of a kind to tempt a connoisseur.

There was to be no honeymoon trip. Stephen Whitelaw did not understand
the philosophy of running away from a comfortable home to spend money in
furnished lodgings; and he had said as much, when the officious Tadman
suggested a run to Weymouth, or Bournemouth, or a fortnight in the Isle
of Wight. To Ellen it was all the same where the rest of her life should
be spent. It could not be otherwise than wretched henceforward, and the
scene of her misery mattered nothing. So she uttered no complaint because
her husband brought her straight home to Wyncomb Farmhouse, and her
wedded life began in that dreary dwelling-place.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

A DOMESTIC MYSTERY.

It was near the end of March, but still bleak cold weather. Ellen Carley
had been married something less than a fortnight, and had come to look
upon the dismal old farm-house by the river with a more accustomed eye
than when Mrs. Tadman had taken her from room to room on a journey of
inspection. Not that the place seemed any less dreary and ugly to her
to-day than it had seemed at the very first. Familiarity could not make
it pleasant. She hated the house and everything about and around it, as
she hated her husband, with a rooted aversion, not to be subdued by any
endeavour which she might make now and then--and she did honestly make
such endeavour--to arrive at a more Christian-like frame of mind.

Notwithstanding this deeply-seated instinctive dislike to all her
surroundings, she endured her fate quietly, and did her duty with a
patient spirit which might fairly be accepted as an atonement for those
inward rebellious feelings which she could not conquer. Having submitted
to be the scapegoat of her father's sin, she bore h