Lady Bell had no idea what the family were going into Peasmarsh for, till Sally Walsh insulted her by the incredulous demand— “You don’t mean to say, Lady Bell, that you don’t know the elections are coming on, and that the Squire is to stand as member? My ears, what do you hear? Father and mother and I, knew this a fortnight ago.” The Squire, who doted on Trevor Court and hated town, who was for his day a lukewarm politician—seeing that politics concerned more men than Dick Trevor, and more places than Trevor Court—what should he do in Parliament? But Lady Bell hardly stopped to ask, and to put two and two together, to argue that there must be an opponent in the field, for the Squire, like a mad bull, would run blindly at an opponent. Here was deliverance, here was a lightening of her load. With the giddiness by no means rooted out of her, and without considering that she had made the same reflection not greatly to her profit once before now, she reflected, it is an ill wind which blows nobody good. To escape from Trevor Court, to leave the Walshes behind her, even for a season, to have a chance of being restored to her beloved town and the countenance of her old friends, for such a gain it was almost worth while to have married Squire Trevor. The occasion of Lady Bell’s leaving was the first time that she had contemplated her world with complacence since she came to Trevor Court. Sitting in the travelling chariot by her husband’s side, Lady Bell was faintly conscious that the fine old place, which he leant out to regard so fondly, deserved the love and honour which had not been hers to give. The clustering stacks of chimneys, with their hospitable spirals of blue smoke, the yew terrace, with its deep shade and broad light, were very fair to see. Lady Bell actually looked round her with interest on the road, as the travellers, at nine miles distance from home, approached the first straggling buildings of Peasmarsh. These were humble enough, but the market-place presented an imposing array of country gentry’s winter houses, an old square-towered Norman church, and a curious town-hall and steeple. There were also, dropped down within its bounds, a thatch-roofed tavern, a dark, cavernous shop, having its gable to the street, with a hanging sign, and a door divided in the middle, a row of coopers’, cobblers’—and booksellers’ stalls, and the jail, with its pair of stocks, yawning for rascally limbs, fixed into the wall. The market-place of Peasmarsh was gay to the young student of human nature, after Trevor Court in the company of Squire Trevor. To Lady Bell’s juvenile satisfaction, the Trevors’ lodging was in the market-place, so that she could hope to see all that was going on, and hear constantly the social patter of clogs and pattens on the flags beneath her windows.