Gwen resumed her seat and took another cup of tea, really to please her hosts, as the tea was too strong for anything. Then Feudalism asserted itself as it so often does when County magnates foregather with village minimates--is that the right word? Landmarks, too, indisputable to need recognition were ignored altogether, and all the hearsays of the countryside were reviewed. The grim severance between class and class that up-to-date legislation makes every day more and more well-defined and bitter had no existence in fifty-four at Chorlton-under-Bradbury. Granny Marrable and the ogress, for instance, could and did seek to know how the gentleman was that met with the accident in July. Of course, _they_ knew the story of the gentleman's relation with "Gwen o' the Towers," and both visitors knew they knew it; but that naturally did not come into court. It underlay the pleasure with which they heard that Mr. Adrian Torrens was all but well again, and that the doctors said his eyesight would not be permanently affected. Gwen herself volunteered this lie, with Sir Coupland's assurance in her mind that, if Adrian's sight returned, it would probably do so outright, as a salve to her conscience. "There now!" said Widow Thrale. "There will be good hearing for Keziah when she comes nigh by us next, maybe this very day. For old Stephen he's just gone near to breaking his heart over it, taking all the fault to himself." Keziah was Keziah Solmes, Stephen Solmes's old wife, whose sentimentalism would have saved Adrian Torrens's eyesight if she had not had such an obstinate husband. Stephen was a connection of the departed saddler, the speaker's husband. Said Sister Nora as they rose to rejoin the carriage:--"Now remember!--you're not to fuss over Dave, Mrs. Thrale. _We'll_ see that he comes to no harm." The ogress did not seem so uneasy about the child, saying:--"It's the picture of the man running from the Police Granny goes by, and 'tis no more than any boy might draw." Whereat Sister Nora said, laughing: "You needn't get scared about Mickey, if that's it. He's just a young monkey." But the old woman seemed still to be concealing disquiet, saying only:--"I had no thought of the boy." She had formed some misapprehension of Dave's surrounding influences, which seemed hard to clear up. Riding home Gwen turned suddenly to her cousin, after reflective silence, saying:--"What makes the old Goody so ferocious against the little boy's Mrs. Picture?" To which the reply was:--"Jealousy, I suppose. What a beautiful sunset! That means wind." But Sister Nora was talking rather at random, and there may have been no jealousy of old Maisie in the heart of old Phoebe.