h, given neither
to drink nor to conversation--just the sort of man, his neighbors said,
to commit a terrible crime, to revenge himself upon a magistrate who
had once sent him to gaol for poaching, and had threatened to turn him
out of his wretched cottage by the pond.

And his little girl too--the villagers were indignant at the way in
which Cynthia was brought up. She was seldom seen in the village school,
never at church or in Mrs. Rumbold's Sunday-classes. She was rough,
wild, ignorant. Careful village mothers would not let their children
play with her, and district-visitors went out of their way to avoid
her--for she had been known to fling stones at boys who had come too
near, and she laughed in the faces of people who tried to lecture her.
Jenny Westwood was thus very little in the way of hearing Beechfield
gossip, or she would have known all about Mr. Lepel and his sister, who
acted as Miss Enid's governess, and concerning whose moonlit walks with
Miss Enid's "papa" there had already been a good deal of conversation.
She knew nothing of all this. There was a big house a mile from the
village, and in this big house lived a wicked cruel man who had sent her
father to prison--so much she knew. And her father was now in prison for
killing that wicked man. Why should one not kill the person who injures
one? It did not seem so very terrible to Cynthia. Before her father had
brought her to Beechfield, she remembered, they had travelled a good
deal from place to place; and while they were "on the tramp," as her
father expressed it, she had seen much of the rougher side of life. She
had seen blows given and returned--fighting, violence, bloodshed. She
had a vague idea that, if her father had killed Mr. Vane, it was perhaps
not the first time that he had taken the life of a fellow-man.

Mrs. Rumbold certainly showed much kindliness and charity in taking this
forlorn little girl into her spotless well-regulated household, even for
a week, until matters were settled with the authorities of the workhouse
which she had quitted and the orphanage to which she was going. The
Rectory servants were indignant at having the society of "a murderer's
child" forced upon them. If she had stayed much longer, they would have
given notice in a body. But fortunately Mrs. Rumbold was able to arrange
matters with the Winstead Sisters very speedily, and the day following
the funeral of Mrs. Sydney Vane--laid to rest beside her husband only
th