was a strange
thing it did not soften him; but he was a fierce dour old man, and had
broken his poor wife's heart with his cruelty, they said. He was mad
after music, and would pay any money for it. So he got this foreigner
to come; who made such beautiful music, that they said the very birds
on the trees stopped their singing to listen. And, by degrees, this
foreign gentleman got such a hold over the old lord, that nothing would
serve him but that he must come every year; and it was he that had the
great organ brought from Holland, and built up in the hall, where it
stood now. He taught the old lord to play on it; but many and many a
time, when Lord Furnivall was thinking of nothing but his fine organ,
and his finer music, the dark foreigner was walking abroad in the woods
with one of the young ladies; now Miss Maude, and then Miss Grace.

Miss Maude won the day and carried off the prize, such as it was; and
he and she were married, all unknown to any one; and before he made his
next yearly visit, she had been confined of a little girl at a
farm-house on the Moors, while her father and Miss Grace thought she
was away at Doncaster Races. But though she was a wife and a mother,
she was not a bit softened, but as haughty and as passionate as ever;
and perhaps more so, for she was jealous of Miss Grace, to whom her
foreign husband paid a deal of court--by way of blinding her--as he
told his wife. But Miss Grace triumphed over Miss Maude, and Miss Maude
grew fiercer and fiercer, both with her husband and with her sister;
and the former--who could easily shake off what was disagreeable, and
hide himself in foreign countries--went away a month before his usual
time that summer, and half-threatened that he would never come back
again. Meanwhile, the little girl was left at the farm-house, and her
mother used to have her horse saddled and gallop wildly over the hills
to see her once every week, at the very least; for where she loved she
loved, and where she hated she hated. And the old lord went on
playing--playing on his organ; and the servants thought the sweet music
he made had soothed down his awful temper, of which (Dorothy said) some
terrible tales could be told. He grew infirm too, and had to walk with
a crutch; and his son--that was the present Lord Furnivall's
father--was with the army in America, and the other son at sea; so Miss
Maude had it pretty much her own way, and she and Miss Grace grew
colder and bitterer to