Then Daniel Caldigate had been alone.
And he was a man who knew how to live alone,--a just, hard, unsympathetic man,--of whom his neighbours said, with something of implied reproach, that he bore up strangely when he lost his wife and girls.

This they said, because he was to be seen riding about the country, and because he was to be heard talking to the farmers and labourers as though nothing special had happened to him.

It was rumoured of him, too, that he was as constant with his books as before; and he had been a man always constant with his books; and also that he had never been seen to shed a tear, or been heard to speak of those who had been taken from him.
He was, in truth, a stout, self-constraining man, silent unless when he had something to say.

Then he could become loud enough, or perhaps it might be said, eloquent.

To his wife he had been inwardly affectionate, but outwardly almost stern.