Within a week of this time, the good folk of Lavenham--especially its womankind--were thrown into a ferment of wonder, indignation, and bewilderment! Rachel Merton, the orphan dressmaking girl, who had been engaged to, and about to marry Richard Green, the farrier and blacksmith--and that a match far beyond what she had any right to expect, for all her pretty face and pert airs, was positively being courted by Bridgman, young, handsome, rich, Mark Bridgman of Red Lodge (the embarrassed state of the gentleman-farmer's affairs was entirely unsuspected in Lavenham); ay, and by way of marriage, too--openly--respectfully, deferentially--as if _he_, not Rachel Merton, were the favored and honored party! What on earth, every body asked, was the world coming to?--a question most difficult of solution; but all doubt with respect to the _bonâ fide_ nature of Mark Bridgman's intentions toward the fortunate dressmaker was soon at an end; he and Rachel being duly pronounced man and wife at the parish church within little more than a fortnight of the commencement of his strange and hasty wooing! All Lavenham agreed that Rachel Merton had shamefully jilted poor Green, and yet it may be doubted if there were many of them that, similarly tempted, would not have done the same. A pretty orphan girl, hitherto barely earning a subsistence by her needle, and about to throw herself away upon a coarse, repulsive person, but one degree higher than herself in the social scale--entreated by the handsomest young man about Lavenham to be his wife, and the mistress of Red Lodge, with nobody knows how many servants, dependents, laborers!--the offer was irresistible! It was also quite natural that the jilted blacksmith should fiercely resent--as he did--his sweetheart's faithless conduct; and the assault which his angry excitement induced him to commit upon his successful rival a few days previous to the wedding, was far too severely punished, every body admitted, by the chastisement inflicted by Mark Bridgman upon his comparatively weak and powerless assailant.