The Manor Farm was one of those rather anomalous habitations, half farm, half gentleman’s house, of which in some of the agricultural counties one sees so many. With no special characteristics of its own, save perhaps that it was somewhat quaint, and decidedly old fashioned: hardly picturesque and not exactly ugly; it was the sort or house that takes its colouring mainly from the lives of its inhabitants. All dwellings are not of this description: there are venerable walls which we cannot but associate with gloom and solemnity, however merry may have been the voices, however ringing the laughter which there we may have heard resound; there are “rose-clad” cottages, which our memory refuses to depict save as smiling in the sunshine, though our sojourn therein may have been of the most sorrowful, and the brightness without seemed but to mock the aching hearts and tear-laden eyes within. But the Manor Farm was by no means an impressive abode. It was comfortable already, and with a little trouble might have been made pretty: but alas, at this time there was no grace or sweetness in the heart of the young girl who came with reluctant steps to be its mistress, whose youth and brightness had been swamped in the deep waters through which she had passed. Unconsciously she was entering on a new phase in her experience. The first effect of her again meeting with Ralph had been to revive in her the consciousness of his irresistibly strong personal influence. For a time she felt very near to him; as if indeed she only lived in the immaterial union with him which she had before imagined was at an end. This did not surprise her. It seemed to her that the bar on her side of a loveless marriage was in point of fact no bar at all: whereas so long as she had believed in his union to another, she had felt herself more utterly divided from him than by death itself. Woman’s indefensible logic, no doubt, but so she felt, and so she expressed it to herself. She was wrong—mistaken to a great extent—she had been drifting away from Ralph. Only his actual presence, his personal influence had recalled her: of which he himself was conscious when he deliberately resolved utterly to sever himself from her life; by no species of intercourse or communication, however apparently innocent or irreproachable, to keep alive in her the consciousness of an influence so fatal to her prospects of peace as the wife of another man.