They all watched for it with curiosity, so far at least as they troubled themselves to notice her at all. But they failed to perceive it. They found that she rode extremely well, and played wonderfully well too, but no one got on with her. She was extraordinarily silent, and they could not divine that she held her tongue so obstinately because she feared every moment that some stinging word would escape her. The week seemed to her a year. She could not see the comedy of the thing as Framlingham had advised her to do. She could only resent helplessly, censure mutely, despise unavailingly, and suffer secretly. She might have been some doomed queen, passing from the prison to the scaffold; and all the incessant chatter and laughter around her awoke no echo in her; it always sounded to her derisive, a mockery of the absurdity of William Massarene masquerading as a country gentleman. She had read a good deal of philosophy, but she could not practice any. The only tolerable moments of the day or night to her were when she was alone in her own rooms with a stray rough large dog of nondescript breed she had found and adopted. “If you must have a filthy beast of that kind, why don’t you buy a decent bred one?” said her father. “They price ’em as high as a thousand guineas at the shows.” “A dog who will sell for a thousand guineas,” she replied, “will never want friends as long as the world is of its present complexion.” William Massarene swore an ugly oath. “Why will you rile your father in that way?” said Margaret Massarene, as he left the room. “You know gold’s his god. And let me tell you, my dear, that if ye’d ever known what ’tis to want it, ye’d tell a different tale. You’ve never had to want nor to wait for naught, for when ye was little I never stinted ye. Your brothers had died of the hard life, and you’d come late when I could do more for ye. Your father’s a great man, my dear, and you should respect him, if there be failings as ye would change in him.” “No doubt you are right, mother,” said her daughter humbly. Perhaps, she thought, she was too unmindful of all that they had done for her. But, oh, if they had only left her to teach their letters to little rough children in the back woods, or play the harmonium in some little iron church buried in the pine gloom of some clearing! “You must stay in my rooms,” she said to the dog, “and only go out with me and never chase the deer, nor go into the covers, for you are in a civilized country which prides itself on its progress and piety, and whose men of light and leading slaughter harmless creatures for pleasure every season of the year. You are a mongrel, they say, poor boy? Well, I believe you are. But ‘hath not a Jew eyes?’ Has not a mongrel nerves to wince, and a heart to ache, and a body to feel cold and pain and hunger, and a fond soul to love somebody, if there be only somebody to love him?”