Mr. Rayner would have been glad of more of even such society as the neighborhood afforded; and, from the bitterness with which he laughed at the paltry pride of small country gentlemen, I soon began to imagine that he must have been snubbed by some among them.

The first Sunday after my arrival was so wet that we could not go to church, so that I had been there a fortnight before I saw a general gathering of the inhabitants. But on the very day previous to this event I had an encounter with two of the ladies of the neighborhood which left a most unpleasant impression upon my mind. Haidee and I were taking our morning walk, when a big Newfoundland dog rushed through a gap in the hedge and frightened my poor little pupil so much that she began to scream. Then a young girl of about fourteen or fifteen, to whom the dog belonged, came up to the hedge, and said that she was sorry he had frightened the child, but that he would not hurt her. And she and I, having soothed Haidee, exchanged a little talk about the fields and her dog, and where the first blackberries were to be found, before we parted, my pupil and I going on by the road while the girl remained in the field. We were only a few steps away when I heard the voice of another girl addressing her rather sharply.

“Who was that you were talking to, Alice?”

The answer was given in a lower voice.

“Well,” the other went on, “you should not have spoken to her. Don’t you know she comes from the house on the marsh?”

The shock given me by those few overheard words--“You should not have spoken to her. Don’t you know she comes from the house on the marsh?”--was so great that I lay awake half the night, at first trying to reconcile Mr. Rayner’s pathetic story with the horror of everything connected with the Alders expressed by the girl to her companion, and then asking myself whether it would be wise to stay in a house to which it was plain that a mystery of some sort was clinging. At last, when my nerves were calmed somewhat and I began to feel sleepy, I made up my mind to set down those unlucky words as the prejudiced utterance of some narrow-minded country-girl, to whom the least touch of unconventionality seemed a dreadful thing. However, I could not dismiss the incident at once from my mind, and the remembrance of it sharpened my attention to the manner of the salutations that Mr. Rayner exchanged with his neighbors the next day.

Although Geldham church was only a short distance from the Alders, Mrs. Rayner was 

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