It was so civilized a place that in the post-office there was a little circulating library, chiefly of novels; and scarcely less innocent was the inn parlour where two papers were taken, and where the village men dropped in as into a club, to see if there was any news. The remains of an old cross stood in the centre of this little square. It was reduced to a mere stone post, with half illegible carvings, and in more modern days somebody had built a drinking-fountain close to it, taking advantage of the old well which had been there from time immemorial. The drinking-fountain was shabby, as drinking-fountains have a way of being, but when horses stopped to drink out of the trough, and a few people came with jugs of an afternoon for the water, which was quite famous for making tea, with the broken old stone of the cross standing up into the blue skies beyond them, it was a pleasant sight enough. Everything, however, was grey with the November chill. Few people were out of doors, but the afternoon had begun to brighten through the haze, promising better weather. “I am going to the almshouses,” said Lucy, making a decided stop, in order to take leave of her companion. “I will walk to the cross with you,” he said. And as they came within reach of the village windows more than one good woman within, glad even of this mild incident to pass the afternoon, came and looked at them across the muslin blind, and decided that something would come o’ that. “And I shouldn’t wonder if it was soon,” said the village dressmaker, getting up to look at the call of her assistant, “for one wedding brings another.” “Oh, is it true as it’s nobody but a poor girl that young Squire has married?” asked the assistant, under her breath, who was young too, and pretty, and remembered that the young Squire had looked in at the window more than once as he had passed. “It might have been _me_!” She said to herself. “There’s that overskirt to finish, Miss Cording,” said the dressmaker peremptorily. She prided herself in allowing no nonsense to be talked among her young ladies. Lucy did not know of the eyes that were upon her, or of the guess in everybody’s mind. She walked very sedately to the cross, and then turned round and bid her cousin good-bye. “I have people to see in the almshouses, too,” he said. “I will go on with you.” “I did not know you went there,” said Lucy. She was better acquainted with the poor people than he was, and indeed did a curate’s work, and saved (though without intending it) a great deal of trouble to the Rector. “You make me out to be worse than I am,” he said, with an uneasy flush upon his face. “I may not perhaps take to the poor people as you do--I have not been brought up to it; but I am not such a stranger in the parish as you think.” “I did not think anything about it,” said Lucy, calmly; and this perhaps he felt the hardest of all.