eem beautiful, or
beautiful only in bitter contrast to my broken heart." But Ellen told
herself that this fate was hers, and that she must needs face it with a
resolute spirit.

The household work employed her mind in some measure, and kept her, more
or less, from thinking; and it was for this reason she worked with such
unflinching industry, just as she had worked in the last month or two at
the Grange, trying to shut her eyes to that hateful future which lay so
close before her. Mr. Whitelaw had no reason to retract what he had said
in his pride of heart about Ellen Carley's proficiency in the dairy. She
proved herself all that he had boasted, and the dairy flourished under
the new management. There was more butter, and butter of a superior
quality, sent to market than under the reign of Mrs. Tadman; and the
master of Wyncomb made haste to increase his stock of milch cows, in
order to make more money by this branch of his business. To have won for
himself a pretty young wife, who, instead of squandering his substance,
would help him to grow richer, was indeed a triumph, upon which Mr.
Whitelaw congratulated himself with many a suppressed chuckle as he went
about his daily labours, or jogged slowly home from market in his
chaise-cart.

As to his wife's feelings towards himself, whether those were cold
indifference or hidden dislike, that was an abstruse and remote question
which Mr. Whitelaw never took the trouble to ask himself. She was his
wife. He had won her, that was the grand point; whatever disinclination
she might have felt for the alliance, whatever love she might have
cherished for another, had been trampled down and subjugated, and he,
Stephen Whitelaw, had obtained the desire of his heart. He had won her,
against that penniless young jackanapes, lawyer Randall's son, who had
treated him with marked contempt on more than one occasion when they
happened to come across each other in Malsham Corn-exchange, which was
held in the great covered quadrangular courtyard of the chief inn at
Malsham, and was a popular lounge for the inhabitants of that town. He
had won her; her own sentiments upon the subject of this marriage were of
very little consequence. He had never expected to be loved by his wife,
his own ideas of that passion called love being of the vaguest; but he
meant to be obeyed by her. She had begun well, had taken her new duties
upon herself in a manner that gladdened his sordid soul; and although
the