from blame impeded the flow of her words. Reduced to plain terms, her
story ran as follows:--

Mary Whittaker was a girl of fourteen when her mother had married Samuel
Learoyd. Of her father she knew nothing. He had died when she was a
baby. From the first the Learoyds had proved an ill-matched pair. Anne
Learoyd, her mother, had been brought up in Leeds, and having been used
to all the excitements of life in a big town, found the solitary farm
lonesome. Samuel Learoyd, though genial enough at times in the society
of his male friends, was capricious. His temper was often sullen, and
when in one of his gloomy moods he would spend the whole evening in his
farm kitchen in morose silence. This state of mind was in part due to
physical infirmity. As a child he had been subject to epileptic fits,
and though these grew less frequent as he advanced to manhood, he never
entirely shook them off, and during his married life a long spell of
gloomy misanthropy would sometimes end in the return of one of these
attacks. He was, too, a proud man, and his pride bred in him a morbid
sensibility towards any slight, real or fanciful, that was practised on
him. He treated his stepdaughter not unkindly, but never accepted any
parental responsibility towards her.

Meanwhile Anne Learoyd, finding no congenial society in her own home,
spent much of her time in neighbours' houses. Her chief friend was the
landlady of the Woolpack Inn, a public-house situated midway between the
farm-house and Holmton. Here whole afternoons and evenings were spent,
and the work of the farm-house was left in the hands of Mary Whittaker,
towards whom her mother had never shown any real affection. Years passed
away and the relations between husband and wife grew steadily worse,
till at length the crisis came. A new barman was appointed at the
Woolpack, a man whom Anne Learoyd had known during her early life in