Mrs Hankworth lived at one of the largest farms in the country, some three miles away from Anne Hilton's cottage. The farmstead was, contrary to the usual custom, not placed near the high road for convenience, but on an eminence in the midst of its own lands. A road had been cut to it between cornfields, so that in the time of springing corn a man walking on this road seemed to be wading to the knees in a green undulating sea, which had risen and submerged the hill. The farm itself was large, with a garden unusually well kept, a sign that the mistress counted in the establishment. Old rose trees grew almost to the roof of the wide building, and the thick turf bore token to the richness of the soil. Inside, the passage, the stairs, the rooms, were all spacious, and, in spite of the rattling of cans and the sound of voices in the kitchen, the place retained an atmosphere of quiet and tranquillity, not of isolation or desertion, but of that comfortable restfulness which one recalls as a child, when, having been ill, one is left at home when the others have gone to school, and remains in a quiet house, watching contentedly the leisurely cheerful movements of one's mother. Mrs Hankworth, the mistress of the best farm in the country, was an enormously stout but very active woman. Her husband, a man half her size and an excellent farmer, exhibited only one trait of nervousness, and that on her account. If she went to market without him he was uneasy until she came back lest something should have happened to her. In all the fifteen years of their married life they had never slept out of their own bed, and they had had no honeymoon. With the contentment of a woman of sound health and of active useful life, who was fully aware that her good sense and management were as necessary to the farm, her husband and twelve children, as his own knowledge of farming, she looked upon this as a just sense of her own value, as indeed it was, and the reward of the confidence which she so completely deserved from her husband. She was generous to her poorer neighbours even when they cheated her. Not taking it very deeply to heart nor expecting much otherwise, she was yet able to remember that her lot was an affluent one compared with theirs, and was ready to excuse even while being perfectly aware of human fraility. Who, when she had sent to an old woman of the village who lived discontentedly on such pickings as she could induce her neighbours to leave her, and who had constantly profited by the liberality of this well-established mistress, a ticket for a large tea, and was informed by some officious person that the husband also had procured a ticket at her expense, said, "He's a poor old crab-stick. It'll do him no harm to have a good tea for once."