After Jim’s marriage Esther continued to manage the house and the dairy, leaving the cooking to her sister-in-law and the needlework to her mother. Soon after five o’clock on a bright summer morning the labourer going to his work heard the unbarring of Mrs. Sutton’s shutters and the withdrawal of bolts. The casement windows and the door were then flung open, and Esther generally came into the doorway and for a few minutes faced the sun. She did not shut herself up. She walked the village like a queen, and no Fen farmer or squireling ventured to jest with her. Mrs. Jarvis could not be brought to admit her stone-blindness and clung to the theory of somebody in London; but as Esther never went to London, and nobody from London came to her, and the postmistress swore no letters passed between London and the Sutton family, Mrs. Jarvis became a little distrusted, although some of her acquaintances believed her predictions with greater firmness as they remained unfulfilled. ‘I don’t care what you may say; don’t tell me,’ was her reply to sceptical objections, and it carried great weight. Esther died of the Blackdeep fever in the fifth year after she came home. As soon as he received the news of her death Mr. Craggs married Mrs. Perkins, who had been twelve months a widow, was admitted into partnership, and is now one of the most respected men in the City. KATE RADCLIFFE IN 1844 there were living between Carlisle and Keswick, Robert Radcliffe and his only child Kate. They belonged to an ancient Roman Catholic family, remotely connected with the Earl of Derwentwater who was executed in 1716; but Robert Radcliffe’s father had departed from the faith of his ancestors, and his descendants, excepting one, had remained Protestant. Robert had inherited a small estate and had not been brought up to any profession. He had been at Cambridge, and at one time it was thought he might become a clergyman, but he had no call that way, and returned to Cumberland after his father’s death to occupy himself with his garden and books. He was a good scholar and had a library of some three thousand volumes. He married when he was about eight-and-twenty, but his wife died two years after Kate was born, and he did not marry again. He took no particular pleasure in field sports except angling, nor in the gaieties of county society, although he was not a recluse and was on friendly terms with most of his neighbours. He was fond of wandering in his own country, and knew every mountain and every pass for twenty miles round him. His daughter was generally his companion, sometimes on her pony and sometimes on foot. Neither of them had been abroad, save once to France when she was about sixteen. They cared little for travelling in foreign parts, and he always said he got nothing out of a place in which he was a lodger. He went once a Sunday to the village church: he was patron of the living. The sermons were short and simple.