THE town of Langborough in 1839 had not been much disturbed since the beginning of the preceding century. The new houses were nearly all of them built to replace others which had fallen into decay; there were no drains; the drinking-water came from pumps; the low fever killed thirty or forty people every autumn; the Moot Hall still stood in the middle of the High Street; the newspaper came but once a week; nobody read any books; and the Saturday market and the annual fair were the only events in public local history. Langborough, being seventy miles from London and eight from the main coach-road, had but little communication with the outside world. Its inhabitants intermarried without crossing from other stocks, and men determined their choice mainly by equality of fortune and rank. The shape of the nose and lips and colour of the eyes may have had some influence in masculine selection, but not much: the doctor took the lawyer’s daughter, the draper took the grocer’s, and the carpenter took the blacksmith’s. Husbands and wives, as a rule, lived comfortably with one another; there was no reason why they should quarrel. The air of the place was sleepy; the men attended to their business, and the women were entirely apart, minding their household affairs and taking tea with one another. In Langborough, dozing as it had dozed since the days of Queen Anne, it was almost impossible that any woman should differ so much from another that she could be the cause of passionate preference. One day in the spring of 1839 Langborough was stirred to its depths. No such excitement had been felt in the town since the run upon the bank in 1825, when one of the partners went up to London, brought down ten thousand pounds in gold with him by the mail, and was met at Thaxton cross-roads by a post-chaise, which was guarded into Langborough by three men with pistols. A circular printed in London was received on that spring day in 1839 by all the respectable ladies in the town stating that a Mrs. Fairfax was about to begin business in Ferry Street as a dressmaker. She had taken the only house to be let in Ferry Street. It was a cottage with a front and back sitting-room, and belonged to an old lady in Lincoln, who inherited it from her brother, who once lived in it but had been dead forty years. Before a week had gone by four-fifths of the population of Langborough had re-inspected it. The front room was the shop, and in the window was a lay-figure attired in an evening robe of rose-coloured silk, the like of which for style and fit no native lady had ever seen. Underneath it was a card—“Mrs. Fairfax, Milliner and Dressmaker.” The circular stated that Mrs. Fairfax could provide materials or would make up those brought to her by her customers.