For one thing, the noise of the row between the Captain and Thomas was soon heard all over Ashbrook. The Vicarage servants retailed it with many embellishments to their friends--as a secret, of course--and Adelaide Codling herself let out some episodes to her then bosom friend. Presently, and in due course, the tale reached the Grange, where it took the circumstantial and easily comprehended form of an account of a great fight between the Captain and the labourer, in which the latter had got two black eyes, a broken nose, cut lips, a thumb out of joint, and some said three, some five teeth knocked down his throat by the scientific handling of the gallant guardsman. It was nothing to the purpose to say that the labourer had been seen going about his work as usual, for people of his sort thought nothing of maulings that would have nearly been the death of superior persons--like flunkeys and valets. In some such guise, the story ultimately reached the ears of Mrs. Morgan, who was so much shocked at the idea of a fight between her brother and a low labouring fellow that she felt constrained to tell her mother, especially as the fight was alleged to have taken place on the Vicarage lawn, in presence of the Vicar's family. Mrs. Morgan, keener sighted than her mother now was, had for some time been aware of the ambitions of Mrs. Codling, so far at any rate as to disapprove of the constant intercourse which the Captain had with the Vicarage. In telling her story, therefore, it was possible for her also to lay emphasis upon the Captain's relationship with the Codlings, which she took care to do, and as she flattered herself much that she succeeded admirably. At first it seemed as if she had done nothing of the kind. The Juno of the parish, Lady Harriet Wiseman, forgot everything for a time in her wrath at the abominable presumption of a labourer in fighting with her blue-blooded son, and was eager to have him arrested and punished. In vain Mrs. Morgan pleaded the scandal such a step would cause; her wrathful ladyship would hear never a word. Nothing pacified her till she had spoken to her son on the subject, and she had so set her heart upon making an example of that vagabond fellow, who had troubled the parish ever since she could remember, that she was positively more angry than before when her son told her that what she wished could not be done for the best of all reasons--there had been no fight. Then her wrath fell partly on her son, and they quarrelled. She asked him what he was doing at the Vicarage. He replied that it was none of her business, and left her with the seeds of jealous suspicion in her heart.