Then Hannah knew why her father kept aloof from his grandson, and pitied
him more than she had done before.

It was the first of October before Geraldine came up to Allington to
claim her boy, of whom she really knew nothing.

Only once since her marriage had she been to the farm-house, and then
she had driven to the door in her handsome carriage with the
high-stepping bays, and had held up her rich silk dress as she passed
through the kitchen into the "best room," around which she glanced a
little contemptuously.

"Not as well furnished as my cook's room," she thought, but she tried to
be gracious, and said how clean every thing was, and asked Hannah if she
did not get very tired doing her own work, and praised the dahlias
growing by the south door, and ate a few plums, and drank some water,
which she said was so cold that it made her think of the famous well at
Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.

"Your well must be very deep. Where is it?" she asked, not because she
cared, but because she must say something.

On being told it was in the woodshed she started for it, and mistaking
the door, was walking into a bedroom, when she was seized roughly by her
father-in-law, whose face was white as ashes, and whose voice shook, as
he said:

"Not in there; this is the way."