Jonathan Dryscoll, the farm-bailiff whom Oliver Tredethlyn had desired his housekeeper to marry, was ten years younger than his wife, and was so poor and weak a creature morally and physically in her hands, that he seemed at least half a century her junior. If she told him to do anything, he did it. If she told him to think anything, he thought it; or would have done so, if the mental exercise had not been generally beyond the scope of his faculties. He was as honest and faithful as Martha herself; but if Martha had told him to go and fire all the ricks on Oliver Tredethlyn’s property, he would have done it with the blind trustfulness of a princess in a child’s story-book, who obeys the eccentric behests of a fairy godmother. That Martha Dryscoll could do anything wrong, or think anything wrong, was an hypothesis which Jonathan her husband had never contemplated. Perhaps the pleasantest thing about this couple was that there was no disagreeable evidence of Martha’s authority. Indeed, that worthy woman was most punctilious in respect to her liege lord and husband, whom she always spoke of as “the master.” Jonathan obeyed and trembled, but the sceptre which his wife wielded was an invisible one, and the chains that bound her slave were as impalpable as if they had been fashioned of cobwebs. Martha Dryscoll was not renowned for her capacity of expressing any species of emotion; but some faint ray of pleasure kindled in her grim face as she conducted Francis Tredethlyn through the kitchen to an apartment that had served as a kind of state chamber for three generations of his race. She set the candle on the polished mahogany table, and, folding her arms, contemplated the new master of the Grange at her leisure. In that dim light, in her quaint, scanty dress, with a brown background of oaken wainscot behind her, she looked like a quaint figure in one of Jan Steen’s pictures, a hard-faced, angular housewife, honest, laborious, and economical, with her ear perpetually open to the leaking of beer-barrels, or the boiling-over of soup-kettles; her eye ever on the alert to perceive waste or destruction. “I wish you welcome, Mr. Tredethlyn,” she said; and then, with something like sadness in her tone, “If the money _was_ to go away from her, better that it should go to you than to strangers. I don’t think that you’d turn your back upon her, if she was to need your help; would you now, Mr. Francis?” “Turn my back upon her!” cried the young man,--“turn my back upon my cousin Susy! Do you think I want the money that ought to have been hers? With God’s blessing, I will go to the end of the world to find my poor little girl. But tell me--tell me all about it, Martha. I know you are a good creature. I know you were fond of Susan, though you seemed hard and stern, like the old man. Tell me all you know about my lost cousin, and don’t fear but I’ll make good use of my knowledge.”