On the whole, this substantial house, with its wide lands, respectable furniture and swarming servants, was one to be proud of. Ellen's position as Squire Joanna Godden's sister was much better than if she were living by herself in some small place on a small income. Her brief adventure into what she thought was a life of fashionable gaiety had discouraged and disillusioned her--she was slowly slipping back into the conventions of her class and surroundings. Ansdore was no longer either a prison or a refuge, it was beginning to be a home--not permanent, of course, for she was now a free woman and would marry again, but a good home to rest in and re-establish herself. Thanks to Ellen's contrivance and to the progress of Joanna's own ambition--rising out of its fulfilment in the sphere of the material into the sphere of style and manners--the sisters now lived the lives of two well-to-do ladies. They had late dinner every night--only soup and meat and pudding, still definitely neither supper nor high tea. Joanna changed for it into smart, stiff silk blouses, with a great deal of lace and guipure about them, while Ellen wore a rest-gown of drifting black charmeuse. Mene Tekel was promoted from the dairy to be Ansdore's first parlourmaid, and wore a cap and apron, and waited at table. Ellen would have liked to keep Mene Tekel in her place and engage a smart town girl, whose hands were not the colour of beetroots and whose breathing could not be heard through a closed door; but Joanna stood firm--Mene had been her faithful servant for more than seven years, and it wasn't right that she should have a girl from the town promoted over her. Besides, Joanna did not like town girls--with town speech that rebuked her own, and white hands that made her want to put her own large brown ones under the table. Sec.3 Early the next year Mr. Pratt faded out. He could not be said to have done anything so dramatic as to die, though the green marsh-turf of Brodnyx churchyard was broken to make him a bed, and the little bell rocked in the bosom of the drunken Victorian widow who was Brodnyx church steeple, sending a forlorn note out over the Marsh. Various aunts in various stages of resigned poverty bore off his family to separate destinations, and the great Rectory house which had for so long mocked his two hundred a year, stood empty, waiting to swallow up its next victim.