of the old house towards the door, he looked back and waved his hand. The gesture and look, she could scarcely tell why, gave her a sensation of sickening dismay and pain. She turned and went in, shutting the door in the sudden pang this gave her. And to shut the great door of the hall was the strangest thing, except in the very heart of winter. While the sun was shining and the air genial, such a thing had never happened before. It seemed in itself a portent of harm. CHAPTER XV. RANDOLPH. Randolph Musgrave was a squire-parson, a class which possesses the features of two species without fully embodying either--which may be finer than either, the two halves of the joint character tempering each other--or may be a travesty of both, exaggerating their mutual defects. He was of the latter rather than of the former development. His living was small in one sense and large in another, the income being large, but the people few and very much given up to dissent, a fact which soured his character without moving him to exertion. He was not fond of exertion in any case, and it was all but hopeless in this. But not less was he daily and hourly irritated by the little Bethels and Salems, the lively Methodists, the pragmatical Baptists, who led his people away. They made him angry, for he was easily moved to anger, and they increased that tendency to listen to gossip and be moved by small matters which is one of the temptations of a rural life. He had become accustomed to make much of petty wrongs, calling them insults and crimes, and perhaps to be more disposed to petty vengeances than a man who is placed in the position of an example to others ought to be; and whereas he had always been disposed to consider himself a sacred person, above the ordinary slights of fortune, this tendency had grown and strengthened so, that every petty pin-prick was like a poisoned arrow to him. By natural laws of reverberation he heard more evil of himself, had more mishaps in the way of gossip, of receiving letters not intended for him, and otherwise surprising the sentiments of his neighbours, than almost any one else ever had--which had made him suspicious of his neighbours in the highest degree, and ready to believe every small offence a premeditated insult. This perhaps made him all the more ready to believe that his sister had conceived a villanous plan against him and his. He would not have done such a thing himself; but was not his life full of such attempts made upon him by others? everybody almost whom he encountered having one time or other conspired against his hopes or happiness. But he had always found out the plots in time. It was true that this villany might be John’s, of whom he would have believed anything; and Mary herself might be the dupe: but most likely it was Mary, who did not like him nor his wife, and who would no doubt be capable of anything to banish him finally from Penninghame, and set up there some creature of her own.