When I thought over all that he had told me, after he had left the room, it was impossible, even setting apart my natural inclination as a woman to put the blame on the woman, not to come to the conclusion that the fault in this most uncomfortable household was chiefly on the side of Mrs. Rayner. I had never seen a more attentive, long-suffering husband, nor a more coldly irritating wife. From all I had seen, I judged that Mr. Rayner was a sociable man, particularly alive to sympathy, fond of conversation and the society of his fellow-men. To such a man the sort of exile his wife’s obstinate reserve and dislike to society condemned him to must have been specially hard to bear with patience. It was true he scoffed at the society the neighborhood afforded, and made me laugh by his description of a country dinner-party, where one could almost predict with certainty what each lady would wear, and where more than half the gentlemen were clergymen, and how the talk would drift after dinner into clerical “shop,” and one of the ladies would play a colorless drawing-room piece on the piano, and one of the gentlemen--a curate nearly always--would sing an unintelligible song, in a husky voice, and, when told--by a lady--how well it suited his style, would reply modestly that Santley’s songs always did. But I fancied that, dull as it might be, Mr. Rayner would have been glad of more of even such society as the neighborhood afforded; and, from the bitterness with which he laughed at the paltry pride of small country gentlemen, I soon began to imagine that he must have been snubbed by some among them. The first Sunday after my arrival was so wet that we could not go to church, so that I had been there a fortnight before I saw a general gathering of the inhabitants. But on the very day previous to this event I had an encounter with two of the ladies of the neighborhood which left a most unpleasant impression upon my mind. Haidee and I were taking our morning walk, when a big Newfoundland dog rushed through a gap in the hedge and frightened my poor little pupil so much that she began to scream. Then a young girl of about fourteen or fifteen, to whom the dog belonged, came up to the hedge, and said that she was sorry he had frightened the child, but that he would not hurt her. And she and I, having soothed Haidee, exchanged a little talk about the fields and her dog, and where the first blackberries were to be found, before we parted, my pupil and I going on by the road while the girl remained in the field. We were only a few steps away when I heard the voice of another girl addressing her rather sharply. “Who was that you were talking to, Alice?” The answer was given in a lower voice. “Well,” the other went on, “you should not have spoken to her. Don’t you know she comes from the house on the marsh?” CHAPTER III.