this epitome of family
history, and thought within herself that it was not without cause she
felt alone here. With a shiver she returned into the sunshine and
proceeded up the public road. The vicarage was a little low house, very
humble in its externals, roofed with fluted tiles, and the walls covered
to the height of the chamber windows with green latticework and
creepers. It stood in a spacious garden and orchard, and had
outbuildings at a little distance on the same homely plan. The living
was in the gift of Abbotsmead, and the Fairfaxes had not been moved to
house their pastor, with his three hundred a year, in a residence fit
for a bishop. It was a simple, pleasant, rustic spot. The lower windows
were open, so was the door under the porch. Bessie saw that it could not
have undergone any material change since the summer days of twenty years
ago, when her father, a bright young fellow fresh from college, went to
read there of a morning with the learned vicar, and fell in love with
his pretty Elizabeth, and wooed and won her.

Bessie, imperfectly informed, exaggerated the resentment with which Mr.
Fairfax had visited his offending son. It was never an active
resentment, but merely a contemptuous acceptance of his irrevocable act.
He said, "Geoffry has married to his taste. His wife is used to a plain
way of living; they will be more useful in a country parish living on
so, free from the temptations of superfluous means." And he gave the
young couple a bare pittance. Time might have brought him relenting, but
time does not always reserve us opportunities. And here was Bessie
Fairfax considering the sorrows and early deaths of her parents,
charging them to her grandfather's account, and confirming herself in
her original judgment that he was a hard and cruel man.

The village of Kirkham was a sinuous wide street of homesteads and
cottages within gardens, and having a green open border to the road
where geese and pigs, cows and children, pastured indiscriminately. It
was the old order of things where one man was master. The gardens had,
for the most part, a fine show of fragrant flowers, the hedges were
neatly trimmed, the fruit trees were ripening abundantly. Of children,
fat and ruddy, clean and well clothed, there were many playing about,
for their mothers were gone to Norminster market, and there was no
school on Saturday. Bessie spoke to nobody, and nobody spoke to her.
Some of the children dropt her a curtsey, bu