The neighbourhood had conspired to hold aloof from them. No one save good Mrs. Jose would speak to either, except on matters necessitating exchange of words. When mother or daughter came into Axmouth or Seaton heads were turned aside, or they were stared at insolently and remarks made behind their backs, perfectly audible and never complimentary. Jane held up her head the highest, became harsher in manner and more peremptory――even with her child. Winefred complained to her of the slights to which she was subjected. 'When we were poor,' said Mrs. Marley, with darkened brow, 'then we were cast out. Now we are rich, we are hated. As they cannot take our money from us, they slander us. We can rub along very comfortably without them. I would leave the place had I not bought the house. I would not have bought it had I thought it would come to this. You shall have richer dresses than any other girl in Axmouth, and go to church to let them see it.' This was not the way to allay suspicion and disarm hostility. Winefred felt it, and shrank from the display her mother forced her to make. She was eminently unhappy; she had not been so continuously wretched before. The imputations cast on her mother angered her. There was an ever open sore; she was sensitive, hearkening for a word, observant for a look or gesture that referred disrespectfully to her mother. Winefred had never made friends. Her mother had sufficed. To her she had clung, to her looked up, in her believed. To hear this mother spoken of as a vulgar thief, a woman taken compassionately into a house, and using her opportunity to rob the man who had shown her mercy――this was intolerable to the high-principled, keenly sensitive child. Knowing that to speak on the matter to her mother only served to make the latter more irritable, Winefred at last shut up her trouble in her breast; but it haunted her by night, it accompanied and overshadowed her by day, and this served to embitter her against the little world that surrounded her. The sole person in whom she could confide was Mrs. Jose, and on her sympathetic bosom she shed floods of tears, whilst the good woman patted and soothed her. But although Mrs. Jose might comfort her she could not drive back the growing sense of resentment wherewith Winefred encountered every one else. Not only was the girl wounded by finding her mother charged with dishonesty, but a new self-esteem had been quickened in her, born of the insistence of her mother that she was a gentleman's daughter, and was destined to be a lady, and to occupy a position high above the heads of those who now depreciated her. A lonely child is liable to become proud, and a wronged child waxes resentful. Hitherto Winefred had been sharp with her tongue, with a good-humoured tartness, but now the cutting words she uttered shot from an angry heart. She must fight her mother's battles, and defend her mother's character with what weapons she possessed.