‘Do you think I am going to make myself unhappy about it? Do you suppose I care what such people say or think of me?’ exclaimed Beatrix, irritably. ‘You must not imagine that they said anything very bad, dear,’ said Bella, soothingly. ‘I shall not imagine anything about them--their remarks are perfectly indifferent to me.’ ‘Of course, dear. What need you care what anybody says--or thinks--with your fortune? You can look down upon the world.’ ‘With my fortune!’ echoed Beatrix, scornfully. ‘I do not know whether I have sixpence belonging to me in this world, and I do not very much care. Indeed, I think I would just as soon be without fortune. I should find out what the world was like then.’ ‘Ah!’ sighed Bella, ‘you would see it “the seamy side without.” It is a very rough world on the wrong side, I assure you.’ Beatrix did not answer. She was wondering how it would be if her father had left his estates away from her. If she were to find herself standing in the bleak hard world, penniless as the beggarmaid chosen by King Cophetua! Would Cyril, her king, in her mind the one pre-eminent man upon earth, would he, the true and noble lover, heedless of fortune, descend from his high estate to win her? She could not doubt that it would be so. Wealth or poverty could make no difference in him. The weary week dragged slowly to its dull dark end. There was a stately funeral, solitary as the life of the dead man had been, for the mourners were but two--Mr. Scratchell, the agent, and Mr. Namby, the village doctor. But the escutcheoned hearse and nodding plumes, the huge Flemish horses with their manes combed reverse ways, the empty black carriages, the hired mourners, cloaked and scarved, and struggling heroically to impart a strangeness of expression to features which were familiar to the populace in every-day life--one of these venal followers being only too well known as a drunken carpenter, and another as a cobbler skilled in his art, but notorious for a too free use of the fire-irons in the correction of his wife and children--these trappings and suits of woe were not wanting. All that the most expensive undertaker in Great Yafford could devise to do honour to the dead was done; and Little Yafford, draining the dregs of its Christmas cup of dissipation, felt that Squire Harefield’s funeral made an appropriate finish to the festivities of the season. The weather had changed; the bare barren fields were lightly powdered with snow, the black ridge of moorland was sharply cut against a bright blue sky. ‘It’s an outing, anyhow,’ said the people of Little Yafford, and there was a good deal of extra liquor consumed at small wayside beerhouses after the funeral.