Everywhere he turned there was a stare: it was on the villagers' faces, behind Miss Batchelor's eye-glass, on the bare fields with their sunken fences, and on that abominable bald-faced house of his.
No doubt this was the secret of the business that took Tyson up to town so many times that winter.

He said nothing to his wife that could account for his frequent absence, but she believed that he was looking about for the long-promised flat; and when he remarked casually one morning that he meant to leave Thorneytoft in the spring she was not surprised.

Neither was Mrs.Wilcox.The flat had appeared rather often in her conversation of late.

Mrs.Wilcox was dimly, fitfully aware of the state of public opinion; but it did not disturb her in the least.

She at once assumed the smile and the attitude of Hope; she smiled on her son-in-law's aberrations as she smiled on the ways of the universe at large, and for the same reason, that the one was about as intelligible as the other.