"'Tis so,'squire; and that's just her case, and she hates to see the very face of him, and avoids him whenever she can do so without giving offence to her uncle, who, they say, has threatened her bitterly about the scornful treatment which she shows him. It's a wonder to me how any person, man or woman, can do otherwise than despise the fellow; for, look you, 'squire, over and above his sulky, sour looks, and his haughty conduct, would you believe it, he won't drink himself, yet he's always for getting other people drunk. But that's not all: he's a quarrelsome, spiteful, sore-headed chap, that won't do as other people. He never laughs heartily like a man, but always in a half-sniffling sort of manner that actually makes me sick at my stomach. Then, he never plays and makes merry along with us, and, if he does, harm is always sure, somehow or other, to come of it. When other people dance and frolic, he stands apart, with scorn in his face, and his black brows gathering clouds in such a way, that he would put a stop to all sport if people were only fools enough to mind him. For my part, I take care to have just as little to say to him as possible, and he to me, indeed; for he knows me just as well as I know him: and he knows, too, that if he only dared to crook his finger, I'm just the man that would mount him on the spot." Ralph could not exactly comprehend the force of some of the objections urged by his companion to the character of Rivers: those, in particular, which described his aversion to the sports common to the people, only indicated a severer temper of mind and habit, and, though rather in bad taste, were certainly not criminal. Still there was enough to confirm his own hastily-formed suspicions of this person, and to determine him more fully upon a circumspect habit while in his neighborhood. He saw that his dislike and doubt were fully partaken of by those who, from circumstance and not choice, were his associates; and felt satisfied--though, as we have seen, without the knowledge of any one particular which might afford a reasonable warranty for his antipathy--that a feeling so general as Forrester described it could not be altogether without foundation. He felt assured, by an innate prediction of his own spirit, unuttered to his companion, that, at some period, he should find his anticipations of this man's guilt fully realized; though, at that moment, he did not dream that he himself, in becoming his victim, should furnish to his own mind an almost irrefutable argument in support of that incoherent notion of relative sympathies and antipathies to which he had already, seemingly, given himself up.