that surround the path of a farmer.

If Ellen Whitelaw's life had been as the lives of happier women, full of
small daily cares and all-engrossing domestic interests, the memory of
that unearthly scream would no doubt have faded out of her mind ere long,
instead of remaining, as it did, a source of constant perplexity to her.
But there was no interest, no single charm in her life. There was nothing
in the world left for her to care for. The fertile flats around Wyncomb
Farmhouse bounded her universe. Day by day she rose to perform the same
monotonous duties, sustained by no lofty aim, cheered by neither
friendship nor affection; for she could not teach herself to feel
anything warmer than toleration for her daily companion, Mrs.
Tadman--only working laboriously because existence was more endurable to
her when she was busy than when she was idle. It was scarcely strange,
then, that she brooded upon the memory of that night when the nameless
stranger had come to Wyncomb, and that she tried to put the fact of his
coming and that other incident of the cry together, and to make something
out of the two events by that means; but put them together as she might,
she was no nearer any solution of the mystery. That her husband and the
stranger could have failed to hear that piercing shriek seemed almost
impossible: yet both had denied hearing it. The story of the stranger
having knocked his shin and cried out on doing so, appeared like a feeble
attempt to account for that wild cry. Vain and hopeless were all her
endeavours to arrive at any reasonable explanation, and her attempts to
get anything like an opinion out of Mrs. Tadman were utterly useless. Mr.
Whitelaw's cousin was still inclined to take a gloomy view of the
stranger's visit, in spite of her kinsman's assurance that the
transaction between himself and the unknown was a profitable one.
Horse-racing--if not parting with a farm--Mrs. Tadman opined was at the
bottom of the business; and when did horse-racing ever fail to lead to
ruin sooner or later? It was only a question of time. Ellen sighed,
remembering how her father had squandered his employer's money on the
race-course, and how, for that folly of his, she had been doomed to
become Stephen Whitelaw's wife. But there did not seem to her to be
anything of the horsey element in her husband's composition. He was never
away from home, except to attend to his business at market; and she had
never seen him spelling over t