Bessie ran till she was out of breath. When she reached her own house, a
cottage in a side lane above the Bolderfields' cottage and overlooking
it from the back, she found her husband sitting with his pipe at the
open door and reading his newspaper. Three out of her own four children
were playing in the lane, otherwise there was no one about.

Isaac greeted her with a nod and slight lightening of the eyes, which,
however, hardly disturbed the habitual sombreness of the face. He was a
dark, finely featured man, with grizzled hair, carrying himself with an
air of sleepy melancholy. He was much older than his wife, and was a
prominent leader in the little Independent chapel of the village. His
melancholy could give way on occasion to fits of violent temper. For
instance, he had been almost beside himself when Bessie, who had
leanings to the Establishment, as providing a far more crowded and
entertaining place of resort on Sundays than her husband's chapel, had
rashly proposed to have the youngest baby christened in church. Other
Independents did it freely--why not she? But Isaac had been nearly mad
with wrath, and Bessie had fled upstairs from him, with her baby, and
bolted the bedroom door in bodily terror. Otherwise, he was a most
docile husband--in the neighbours' opinion, docile to absurdity. He
complained of nothing, and took notice of little. Bessie's untidy ways
left him indifferent; his main interest was in a kind of religious
dreaming, and in an Independent paper to which he occasionally wrote a
letter. He was gardener at a small house on the hill, and had rather
more education than most of his fellows in the village. For the rest he
was fond of his children, and, in his heart of hearts, exceedingly proud
of his wife, her liveliness and her good looks. She had been a
remarkably pretty girl when he married her, some eight years after his
first wife's death, and there was a great difference of age between