‘He has travelled so much, you know, my dear,’ said Mrs. Piper, of the Park, to Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘and having married a foreigner, you see, one can hardly expect him to be quite correct in his ideas. A sad education for that poor girl. I am told he has taught her Greek, and hasn’t allowed her to learn music. But I think that can hardly be true.’ ‘It is actually true about the music,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, reflecting her friend’s look of horror. ‘He hates the piano, and he had Mrs. Harefield’s old-fashioned Broadwood sent up to the lumber-room in the tower. But there is no use in thwarting a natural gift. That poor child has taught herself by ear, and plays and sings very sweetly. She spends hours up in that old turret room--in the coldest weather--wrapped in a shawl, picking out our church music. Mrs. Harefield had an extraordinary gift, you know.’ ‘I never saw Mrs. Harefield. She died before Ebenezer took the Park.’ ‘Yes, of course. I ought to have remembered. She was a lovely woman; and I believe that Christian Harefield was passionately fond of her, in his way; but it was not a happy marriage; there were quarrels. I did my best, but not successfully. There is an unconquerable severity and coldness in that man’s nature; and his wife had one of those ardent, impetuous dispositions,--you know what I mean.’ ‘Exactly,’ chimed in the visitor, whose mind had wandered a little, and who was wondering when the Dulcimers would have a new drawing-room carpet. The present one was threadbare, and had been ingeniously turned and pieced, like a puzzle, odd bits of brighter colour fitting in here and there rather too obviously. That foolish Mr. Dulcimer spent all his money on books, and never improved his furniture, whereas in Mrs. Piper’s ideal house there was no litter of books and pamphlets, but the last fashion in carpets and tapestry table-covers, cabriole chairs and sofas, and the newest kinds of antimacassars. Although Mr. Harefield was not often to be seen in the parish church himself, he had no objection to his daughter’s frequent attendance there; and the church and the vicarage afforded the only variety in the dullest life that a well-born heiress ever led. The music was a delight to her sensitive ear; for the organist was a fine musician, and the organ was a noble instrument, which had been presented to Little Yafford in the reign of William the Third, by a city merchant who had been born in the village, and who came back there to die after having made his fortune in hides and tallow. His monument, in coloured and gilded marbles, after the florid style of the period, adorned the chancel, and recorded his public and private virtues, and his munificent gift of the organ, in a long Latin epitaph, with a great many adjectives ending in _issimus_.