Again, as to character. Everybody who was familiar with Miss Harefield--by meeting her occasionally in her drives and rides, or seeing her once a week at church--was aware that she was a girl of reserved and even melancholy temperament, from whom anything strange in conduct or morals might be expected. Then, again, she was of foreign extraction on the mother’s side, and as such prone to crime. She was Italian, and with a natural leaning to poison and parricide. And again, those stock figures of the Borgia and Cenci were brought forward and contemplated shudderingly in the lurid glare of their guilt. Some weak-minded persons clung to the idea that Mr. Harefield had taken an overdose of opium unwittingly, but this tame and uninteresting theory was scouted by the majority. ‘If Miss Harefield had not been an heiress we should have heard a good deal more about her father’s death,’ said Miss Coyle, draining her ancestral teapot at one of her temperate symposia. Miss Coyle was quite angry with the coroner for not having looked deeper into things. She spoke of him contemptuously as a hireling and a time-server. Cyril Culverhouse knew what people thought about the woman he loved--for he loved her none the less because he held himself aloof from her. His love was deathless. Innocent or guilty he must love her to the end. He knew what people thought of his beloved; he knew that even kindly Mrs. Dulcimer shook her head, and shrank from familiar contact with her husband’s ward. There was no one in Little Yafford except the Vicar who would take the slandered girl by the hand and boldly demonstrate his belief in her innocence. He, so easy-going on most occasions, was firm as a rock here. He would have Beatrix at his house, as often as she chose to come there--although the all-powerful Rebecca would hardly look civilly at her as she waited at table--and although poor Mrs. Dulcimer was sorely perplexed by her presence. Clement Dulcimer was staunch, and defied his parishioners, whom he stigmatised generally as a pack of venomous scandalmongers, whose uncultured minds, unable to appreciate the strong sound meat of literature, battened upon carrion.