Why should Nelly want to go so soon?
The beauty and luxury of the cottage--the mere tea-table with all its perfect appointments of fine silver and china, the multitude of cakes, the hot-house fruit, the well-trained butler--all the signs of wealth that to Nelly were rather intimidating, and to Sarratt--in war-time--incongruous and repellent, were to Bridget the satisfaction of so many starved desires.

This ease and lavishness; the best of everything and no trouble to get it; the 'cottage' as perfect as the palace;--it was so, she felt, that life should be lived, to be really worth living.

She envied the Farrells with an intensity of envy.

Why should some people have so much and others so little?
And as she watched Sir William's attentions to Nelly, she said to herself, for the hundredth time, that but for Nelly's folly, she could easily have captured wealth like this.

Why not Sir William himself?
It would not have been at all unlikely that they should come across him on one of their Westmorland holidays.