Also, Cynthia's father, now in prison for the murder of Sydney Vane, had not lived long in Beechfield, and did not know the history and relationships of the Squire's family, as natives of Beechfield were supposed to do. He had been two years in the village, and had rented a tumbledown ruinous cottage by the side of a marshy pond, which no one else would occupy. Here he had lived a lonely life, gathering rushes from the pond and weaving baskets out of them, doing a day's work in the fields now and then, setting snares for rabbits, trapping foxes, and killing game--a man suspected by the authorities, shunned by the village respectabilities, avoided by even those wilder spirits who met at the "Blue Lion" to talk of bullocks and to drink small-beer. For he was not of a genial disposition. He was gruff and surly in speech, 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.