The evening of the next day, however, found him in a very different frame of mind. Not one word had been heard from Barbara; and the fact of her absence, and the manner of her departure, had been thoroughly well discussed throughout the neighbourhood. Early in the morning, Frank, with the conviction that all must eventually be known, had removed the seal from his mother's lips; and the old lady's circumstantial account, softened as much as her conscience would allow,--for she felt really more strongly than she had admitted about Barbara's defection,--was detailed to various knots of fa-miller friends throughout the day. The astonishment of the Mesopotamians was immense; immense their horror, deep the condemnation they poured upon the peccant one. The good women of the district could not realise what had occurred. If Barbara had eloped, they would have had some slight glimmering of it; though an elopement was a thing which in their idea only occurred in highly aristocratic families. They had heard through the medium of the newspapers, stories of post-chaise followed by post-chaise speeding along the northern road, guilty wife and "gay Lothario" (Mesopotamian phrase for cavalier villany varying from seduction to waltzing) in the one, injured husband in the other. But how a woman could take herself off, leave her home and her husband, and send a servant for her things afterwards, my dear, as cool as if she were going by the railway train,--that beat them altogether. But though they could not understand, they could condemn, and did, in most unmeasured terms. Whatever the motive might have been, and the most energetic among them could not find in what was said any thing particularly damnifying ("in what is said, my dear; but I'm sure there must be something behind all this that we don't know of, but which will come out some day"),--whatever the motive might have been, there was the fact; that could not be got rid of or explained away: Mrs. Frank Churchill had left her home and was not living with her husband. What more or less could you make of that? Some of them had seen it in her from the first. There was something--one section said, in her eye, another in her manner--which showed discontent, or worse. "Something" in her walk which displeased many of them greatly--"as though the ground she trod upon was not good enough for her," they said. And she who had held her head so high, for whom none of them were good enough, had come to this. Well, if being a fine lady and being brought up amongst great people led to _that_, thank goodness they were as they were.